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Studies  in  Democracy 


.Gul  iver 


UC-NRLF 


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Studies  in  Democracy 

The  Essence  of  Democracy 
The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

American  Women's  Contribution  to 
Democracy 


By 

Julia  H.  Gulliver,  Ph.D.,  LL.D. 

President  of  Rockford  College  for  Women 
Rockford,  111. 


G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

New  York  and  London 

Gbe  "Knickerbocker  press 

1917 


^s 

l(r?7 

<s 


Oorrmicvr.  1917 

•T 

O.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 


Ubc  Knickerbocker  pre««,  Hew  fiorft 


CONTENTS 

I 

PACK 

THE  ESSENCE  OF  DEMOCRACY  i 

II 

THE  TWENTIETH-CENTURY  SEARCH  FOR  THE 

HOLY  GRAIL 32 

in 
THE  EFFICIENCY  OF  DEMOCRACY        .         .      64 


in 


STUDIES    IN    DEMOCRACY 


THE  ESSENCE  OF  DEMOCRACY1 

OUR  minds  and  hearts  have  been  steeped 
in  horrors  for  months  past.  All  Europe 
has  been  converted  into  shambles. 
Each  of  the  warring  nations  has  been  calling 
upon  God  as  the  sponsor  of  its  particular 
cause — and  the  causes  are,  to  all  appearances, 
diametrically  opposed.  But  in  the  Eternal 
there  can  be  no  schism.  God,  in  whom  all 
peoples,  whatever  their  kindred  or  nation,  live 
and  move  and  have  their  being — God  is  one. 
As  monotheists,  how  else  can  we  read  the  riddle 
of  the  universe?  God  is  good.  As  Christians, 
how  else  can  we  daily  take  upon  our  lips  those 
supernal  opening  words  of  the  Lord's  prayer, 
"Our  father,  who  art  in  heaven"? 

•  Baccalaureate  Address,  1915. 

I 


2        The  Essence  of  Democracy 

What  then?  Why,  then,  there  must  be  some 
"divine  intent,"  not  improbably  some  "far-off 
divine  intent"  which  is  going  ultimately  to 
justify  all  this  ghastly  suffering  and  bloodshed. 
What  is  it? 

One  of  the  most  fundamental  and  perhaps 
one  of  the  most  justifiable  causes  that  has  been 
fixed  upon  for  the  present  violent  disturbance 
in  Europe  is  the  desire  for,  if  not  the  necessity 
of,  more  territory, — greater  breathing  space,— 
room  for  expansion.  At  this  point  let  me  pause 
a  moment  to  say  that  if  the  root  of  the  trouble  is 
here,  and  so  far  as  it  is  legitimately  here,  we,  as 
Americans,  cut  a  sorry  figure  in  assuming  any 
superior  virtue,  because  we  are  the  advocates 
of  peace  and  because  we  benevolently  and 
impartially  desire  the  good  of  humanity  as  a 
whole.  Why?  Because  with  the  vast  re- 
sources of  this  country  that  are  still  undeveloped 
and  the  wide-flung  spaces  still  uninhabited,  our 
virtue  is  no  virtue  at  all,  but  merely  a  geographi- 
cal accident. 

The  need  for  expansion — the  need  for  "al- 
ways something  more,  always  something  better," 


The  Essence  of  Democracy         3 

is  to  my  mind,  in  very  truth,  the  deep  under- 
lying cause  of  the  present  European  war ;  it  is  the 
divine  intent  which  will  ultimately  fulfil  and  so 
harmonize  all  these  warring  interests.  Needless 
to  say,  however,  that  this  cannot  find  expression 
in  the  mutually  exclusive  greed  of  the  different 
nations  for  more  territory.  Do  you  remember 
the  pumpkin  I  told  you  about  some  time  ago, 
by  way  of  illustration,  which,  in  the  initial 
stages  of  its  growth,  had  been  bound  fast  by  an 
iron  ring?  Apparently  this  ring  was  an  in- 
exorable band  that  had  neverthless  been  power- 
less against  the  irrepressible  vital  principle  that 
caused  the  pumpkin  to  grow  in  spite  of  it,  to 
this  side  and  to  that,  any  way  and  every  way,  to 
work  out  its  fulfilment.  ''I  am  come  that 
they  might  have  life,  and  that  they  might  have 
it  more  abundantly,"  said  Jesus.  I  think  that 
I  began  quoting  these  words  to  you  in  your 
freshman  year.  To-day  I  find  their  meaning 
still  unexhausted.  Life,  as  contrasted  with 
stagnation,  negation,  passivity,  destruction, 
death;  against  this  mighty,  uptending  power 
of  life  in  the  universe,  Goethe's  Mephistopheles 


4        The  Essence  of  Democracy 

rages  furiously,  as  has  every  Mephistopheles 
before  and  since  his  time.  But,  according  to 
the  poet's  inspired  insight,  all  the  Mephistophe- 
lean forces  that  can  be  let  loose  by  means  of 
earthquake,  tempest,  wave,  and  fire  are  power- 
less against  that  magnificent  vitality,  which 
meets  death  with  an  ever  newer  and  ever  fresher 
infusion  of  life. 

Of  the  twenty-eighth  chapter  of  Isaiah, 
which  has  been  read  in  your  hearing  this  morn- 
ing, George  Adam  Smith  says:  "It  still  tastes 
fresh  to  thirsty  men."  In  it  occur  these  words: 
"For  the  bed  is  shorter  than  a  man  can  stretch 
himself  on  it ;  and  the  covering  narrower  than  he 
can  wrap  himself  in  it."  Dr.  Smith  explains  in 
brief  that  when  these  words  were  written,  they 
meant  that  men  had  formed  in  their  minds  a 
scheme  of  action  that  was  too  narrow  for  the 
events  taking  place.  The  men  of  Judah  thought 
that  some  alliance  with  a  foreign  power  would 
save  them  from  impending  political  destruction. 
No,  says  Isaiah,  the  only  way  you  are  going  to 
be  saved  is  to  believe  in  God.  No  man-made 


The  Essence  of  Democracy         5 

device  is  going  to  meet  the  bigness  and  the 
horror  of  the  calamity  that  threatens.  Rather 
must  you  be  caught  up  into  the  swing  and  the 
vastness  of  the  Divine  purposes,  and  wait  for 
their  revealment. 

The  impulse  toward  expansion  which  is 
causing  the  mighty  upheaval  we  are  witnessing 
to-day  cannot  be  expressed  in  terms  of  increased 
territory.  That  bed  is  shorter  than  a  man  can 
stretch  himself  on  it,  and  that  covering  narrower 
than  he  can  wrap  himself  in  it.  There  is  a 
painting  by  an  English  artist,  Alfred  Hartley, 
called  Silvery  Night.  It  portrays  the  top  of  a 
wooded  mountain  reaching  upward  into  the 
veiled  moonlight  of  a  summer  night.  All  that 
is  visible  is  the  mountain-top  and  the  sky. 
Hartley's  critic  quotes  from  Byron's  Childe 
Harold: 

"tome 
High  mountains  are  a  feeling,  " 

and  says  that  it  is  applicable  to  certain  mountain 
pictures  by  this  painter.  It  is  applicable  to 


6        The  Essence  of  Democracy 

this  one  of  which  I  am  speaking,  but  the  feeling 
does  not  stop  with  the  mountain,  which  serves 
rather  to  carry  the  mind  out  and  beyond  itself 
into  the  infinitude  of  the  stellar  spaces.  Let  us 
beware,  in  the  present  situation,  how  we  allow 
our  minds  to  stop  at  any  mountain-top,  however 
lofty  and  sacred,  lest  we  fall  short  of  the  great- 
ness of  the  divine  purpose  in  the  present  crisis. 
Many  who  would  repudiate  territorial  expan- 
sion as  an  adequate  end  of  this  war,  are  crying 
out  for  peace  as  its  desired  culmination,  and 
peace  in  the  near  future.  Suppose  peace  could 
be  concluded  this  summer,  is  it  clear  that  any- 
thing would  have  been  really  settled?  Is  it  not 
clear  that  it  would  eventuate  merely  in  a  truce 
that  requires  only  time  to  break  out  again  into 
hostilities?  Peace  at  any  price  is  a  slogan  at 
once  too  costly  and  too  narrow  to  meet  the 
present  crisis. 

Again,  the  claim  that  women  have  a  peculiar 
right  to  demand  the  cessation  of  hostilities 
because  of  the  hideous  violation  of  the  rights 
of  the  family  that  follows  close  in  the  wake  of 
war,  and  because  "in  certain  regards  they  are 


The  Essence  of  Democracy         7 

more  sensitive  than  men, "  especially  as  concerns 
the  sanctity  of  human  life,  this  claim,  with 
whatever  sweet  reasonableness  it  is  and  may  be 
urged,  I  venture  here  and  now  to  repudiate  as 
too  narrow  an  interpretation  of  the  times  in 
which  we  live.  Peace  is  a  lofty  eminence,  the 
sanctity  of  the  family  is  a  mountain-top  of 
human  endeavor  and  aspiration.  But,  above 
these  and  including  these,  are  starry  spaces  that 
reach  wide  and  far,  and  they  must  be  reckoned 
with  in  an  evaluation  of  the  situation.  I 
deprecate  this  idea  that  the  care  of  the  home  is 
chiefly  or  solely  the  woman's  concern.  I  do 
not  believe  that  the  best  men  are  any  less 
sensitive  than  the  best  women  to  the  sanctity  of 
human  life.  Witness  the  superb  renunciation 
of  the  men  on  the  Lusitania,  not  one  of  whom 
kept  a  life  belt  for  himself,  but  all  of  whom,  so 
far  as  is  known,  relinquished  the  life  belts 
they  might  have  had  themselves  to  save  some 
helpless  woman  or  child.  Moreover,  it  would 
be  no  extravagance  to  say  that  there  are  hun- 
dreds, not  to  say  thousands  of  American  men, 
who  would  have  done  precisely  the  same  thing 


8         The  Essence  of  Democracy 

under  the  same  circumstances,  and  would  have 
done  it  grandly,  with  a  smile  on  their  faces  and 
peace  in  their  hearts,  as  Alfred  Vanderbilt 
did  it  and  as  Prohman  did  it.  I  have  fre- 
quently talked  with  you  of  the  senior  class 
regarding  the  peculiar  function  and  duties  of 
the  woman.  To-day  I  find  this  of  too  narrow  a 
scope.  Men  and  women  are  alike  summoned 
to  gird  on  the  whole  armor  of  God  and  to 
ask:  What  will  make  peace  not  only  possible, 
but  honorable  and  permanent?  What  can 
make  the  human  personality  more  sacrosanct 
in  all  its  relations,  whether  in  the  family  or 
outside  of  the  family  than  it  is  at  present? 
We  have  already  raised  the  question:  What 
is  the  impulse  toward  expansion  that  is  now  at 
work  among  the  nations  of  Europe?  The 
answer  to  it  furnishes  a  portico,  as  it  were,  to 
the  answer  of  this  more  general  question.  To 
my  mind,  the  impulse  toward  expansion,  which 
underlies  the  present  world-upheaval,  is  the 
impulse  toward  the  democratizing  of  Europe. 
Whether  you  and  I  will  see  it  or  not,  is  beside 
the  question.  Just  when,  just  how,  or  just 


The  Essence  of  Democracy        9 

where  it  will  actualize  itself,  who  can  say? 
But  that  it  is  coming  is  as  sure,  as  inevitable, 
as  the  working  of  the  law  of  gravitation. 

What,  then,  in  general,  is  the  essence  of 
democracy? 

At  bottom,  it  is,  I  believe,  an  attitude  of 
mind  and  heart  and  soul.  If  we  can  determine 
in  some  measure  what  that  attitude  is,  and  if, 
so  far  as  in  us  lies,  we  can  make  that  attitude 
our  own,  we  shall  furnish  the  finest  conceivable 
individual  contribution  to  the  need  of  the  world 
at  the  present  time.  The  making  of  bandages, 
the  knitting  of  stockings,  the  care  of  the 
wounded,  even  the  giving  up  of  the  physical 
life  on  the  battle-field — believe  me — are,  in 
comparison,  as  bubbles  on  the  surface  of  the 
stream. 

What  is  the  attitude  of  mind  and  heart  and 
soul  that  constitutes  the  essence  of  democracy? 

As  the  most  effective  way  of  getting  a  vital 
conception  of  what  it  is,  may  I  call  your  atten- 
tion to  the  fact  that  Abraham  Lincoln  was,  by 
general  acknowledgment,  one  of  the  greatest 
democrats  that  ever  lived;  that  certain  issues, 


io       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

moreover,  of  our  Civil  war,  in  the  defining  and 
solution  of  which  he  so  nobly  actualized  the 
spirit  of  democracy,  furnish  illuminating  mate- 
rial for  the  evaluation  of  present  day  issues. 
How  strongly  he  felt  that  the  problem  of  dem- 
ocracy, as  it  was  worked  out  in  this  country, 
was  of  world-wide  significance,  and  how  deeply 
he  felt  that  his  life  itself  was  to  be  counted  as 
refuse,  if  only  he  might  help  to  solve  it  for  us 
and  for  all  people,  is  evidenced  by  his  speech 
at  Independence  Hall,  Philadelphia,  February 
22,  1861.  He  said: 

"I  have  often  inquired  of  myself  what  great 
principle  or  idea  it  was  that  kept  this  confeder- 
acy so  long  together.  It  was  not  the  mere 
matter  of  the  separation  of  the  colonies  from 
the  motherland,  but  that  sentiment  in  the 
Declaration  of  Independence  which  gave  liberty 
not  alone  to  the  people  of  this  country,  but  hope 
to  all  the  world  for  all  future  time.  It  was  that 
which  gave  promise  that  in  due  time  the  weights 
would  be  lifted  from  the  shoulders  of  all  men  and 
that  all  should  have  an  equal  chance.  This  is 
the  sentiment  embodied  in  the  Declaration  of 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       u 

Independence. "  He  added  that  if  this  country 
could  not  be  saved  on  that  principle  he  would 
rather  be  assassinated  on  the  spot  than  surrender 
it.  The  speech  closed  with  these  memorable 
words:  "I  have  said  nothing  but  what  I  am 
willing  to  live  by,  and,  if  it  be  the  pleasure  of 
Almighty  God,  to  die  by." 

At  that  very  time  he  knew  that  a  conspiracy 
had  been  formed  to  kill  him.  We  all  know  how 
the  "last  full  measure  of  devotion "  was  required 
of  him,  in  that  it  proved  expedient  that  one  man 
should  die  for  the  people — another  striking 
confirmation  of  what  I  have  said,  that  the  pre- 
servation of  human  life  is  not  an  exclusive  or  even 
a  pre-eminent  function  of  the  women  of  the 
race,  but  is  rather  a  matter  of  human  concern— 
a  paramount  duty  which  men  and  women  are, 
one  and  all,  highly  summoned  to  perform. 

No  exhaustive  study  of  our  Civil  war  is  neces- 
sary to  furnish  illuminating  confirmation  also 
of  the  fact  I  have  wanted  to  make  clear  regard- 
ing the  present  war,  namely,  that  peace  and 
immediate  peace  may  be  bought  at  too  dear  a 
price.  "  Neither  party, "  said  President  Lincoln 


12       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

in  his  second  inaugural  address  (1865),  "  neither 
party  expected  for  the  war  [•'.  e .  the  Civil  war] 
the  magnitude  or  the  duration  which  it  has 
already  attained.  .  .  .  Each  looked  for  an 
easier  triumph  and  a  result  less  fundamental  and 
astonishing."  Just  as  some  of  the  wisest  and 
the  finest  among  us  now  find  the  be-all  and  the 
end-all  of  this  present  war  in  immediate  peace, 
in  the  preservation  of  the  sacredness  of  the 
family  tie,  and  so  on,  so  there  were  many  de- 
voted spirits  at  the  time  of  our  Civil  war  who 
felt  that  the  be-all  and  end-all  of  the  war  was 
the  abolition  of  slavery — an  idea  that  even  now 
still  obtains.  Not  so  Mr.  Lincoln.  From  the 
first,  he  grasped  the  real  issue,  namely,  the 
preservation  of  the  Union.  This  was  what  our 
Civil  war  was  primarily  for.  Let  it  be  engraved 
on  the  lintels  of  our  doors.  The  abolition  of 
slavery  was  an  entirely  secondary  issue.  Many 
felt  that  Mr.  Lincoln  could  and  should  have 
brought  the  war  to  a  close  speedily,  long  before  it 
was  actually  done, — a  war  in  which  "every 
twenty-four  hours  saw  an  expenditure  of  two 
millions  of  money, " — a  war  that  averaged  two 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       13 

engagements  a  day  for  four  years, — a  war  in 
which  the  flower  of  the  nation's  manhood  was 
being  slain, — a  war  in  which  the  hearts  of  the 
nation's  women  were  being  crushed  and  the 
lives  of  the  nation's  little  children  were  being 
broken  on  an  inexorable  wheel.  Says  Nicolay 
in  his  book  on  Abraham  Lincoln-  "The  labor, 
the  thought,  the  responsibility,  the  strain  of 
the  intellect  and  anguish  of  soul  that  he  gave 
to  his  great  task — who  can  measure?"  That 
furrowed  face  upon  which  all  this  is  written— 
who  can  look  upon  it  unmoved? 

Through  it  all  he  saw  the  situation  "steadily 
and  saw  it  whole."  He  knew  that  unless  we 
had  a  place  and  a  nation,  what  was  done  in  that 
place  or  nation,  of  any  sort  or  description  what- 
soever, was  an  irrelevant  question.  Let  us  be 
thankful  that  there  was  a  strong  feeling  in  the 
North  that  upheld  and  supported  him  in  his 
view  that  a  war  which,  in  essence,  was  a  war 
for  the  preservation  of  the  Union,  should  not  be 
converted  into  a  war,  first  and  foremost,  for 
the  abolition  of  slavery.  Was  not  Lincoln  op- 
posed to  slavery  then?  Yea,  verily.  As  early 


14       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

as  1841  he  saw  ten  or  twelve  slaves  shackled 
together  at  Louisville  and  this  is  what  he  said 
of  it:  "That  sight  was  a  continued  torment  to 
me.  ...  It  is  not  fair  for  you  to  assume  that 
I  have  no  interest  in  a  thing  which  has  and 
continually  exercises  the  power  of  making  me 
miserable.  You  ought  rather  to  appreciate 
how  much  the  great  body  of  the  northern  people 
do  crucify  their  feelings  in  order  to  maintain 
their  loyalty  to  the  Constitution  and  the 
Union."  The  Constitution  and  the  Union! 
These  were  the  starry  heavens  that  in  Lincoln's 

mind  towered  above  the  mountain-top  question 

. 

tho  fe  abolition  of  slavery — a  mountain-top 
which,  as  has  been  abundantly  shown,  was  a 
"feeling"  to  him.  But  at  whatever  cost,  he 
would  be  loyal,  first,  last,  and  all  the  time,  to 
the  Constitution  and  the  Declaration  of  Inde- 
pendence upon  which  it  grew.  What  he  could 
do,  within  the  limits  of  the  Constitution,  to  abol- 
ish slavery,  that  he  would  do,  and  did  do.  He 
never  believed  from  the  first  that  the  Constitu- 
tion permitted  the  abolition  of  slavery  in  the 
slave  states.  All  that  could  be  done,  as  he 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       15 

believed,  within  the  limits  of  the  Constitution, 
was  to  prevent  the  extension  of  slavery  into  the 
other  states  and  into  the  territories,  where  it 
did  not  already  exist.  When  he  did  finally 
issue  the  proclamation  that  emancipated  the 
slaves  in  all  the  states,  he  did  it  primarily  not 
to  free  the  slaves,  but  as  a  war  measure  to 
weaken  the  seceding  states.  Up  to  this  time, 
he  had  been  abused  because  he  had  not  done  it 
before.  Now  he  was  calumniated  because  he 
had  done  it  at  all.  If  he  had  done  it  earlier, 
he  would  have  alienated  the  support  of  Mary- 
land, Kentucky,  and  Missouri,  in  fact  of  all  the 
border  states.  If  he  had  not  done  it  when  he 
did,  he  would  have  imperiled  the  Union.  "A 
house  divided  against  itself  cannot  stand." 
Undoubtedly  it  is  true  that  the  two  great 
achievements  of  his  administration  were  the 
permanent  re-establishment  of  the  Union  and 
the  freeing  of  the  slaves;  but  the  second  was 
logically  and  as  a  matter  of  fact  distinctly 
subordinate  to  the  first.  How  subordinate  is 
evidenced  by  his  solemn  statement,  "I  will  hold 
the  states  in  the  Union — with  slavery  if  I  must." 


1 6       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

Let  me  bespeak  your  whole-souled  attention 
to  this  clean-cut,  spiritual  discernment  of  rela- 
tive values.  In  every  situation,  there  is  the 
possibility  of  preferring  the  lower  to  the  higher, 
nay,  of  considering  that  the  lower  is  the  higher 
—the  lower  which,  relatively  speaking,  may  be 
as  the  husks  that  the  swine  do  eat  in  comparison 
with  the  father's  house  and  all  the  soul-goods 
that  it  represents.  Is  it  not  of  vital  importance 
for  us  to  try  to  discern  how  this  great  democrat 
thus  fulfilled  the  first  essential  condition  of 
democracy?  for  so  I  consider  it  to  be.  His  was 
no  coldly  exclusive  intellectual  decision.  It 
had  the  whole  man  behind  it.  He  was  a  unique 
exemplification  of  a  self  that  was  not  mechani- 
cally divided  up  into  water-tight  compartments, 
but  a  self  that  attacked  a  problem  organically 
as  a  living  whole:  that  body  of  his  inherited 
from  the  common  people  who  work  with  their 
hands — a  body  of  "rugged  and  stubborn 
health,"  as  Phillips  Brooks  characterizes  it; 
that  brain  of  his  trained  to  nice  logical  distinc- 
tions, and  to  the  habit  of  precise  statement; 
that  soul  of  his  with  such  a  passion  for  fair 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       17 

dealing  that  it  was  a  common  thing  for  his 
opponent  in  court  to  submit  his  case  for  trial 
on  Lincoln's  presentation  of  the  facts  rather 
than  on  his  own ;  that  heart  of  his  so  tender,  so 
full  of  sympathy  that  drunkards  and  traitors 
and  personal  enemies  turned  to  him  for  under- 
standing and  mercy  when  all  else  failed;  that 
spirit  of  his  so  profoundly  and  awfully  con- 
scious of  his  own  personality  as,  in  the  last 
analysis,  the  sole  mountain- top  of  refuge  for 
his  torn  and  bleeding  nation,  but  a  mountain- 
top  that,  after  all,  brought  salvation  only  because 
it  helped  to  lead  men's  minds  beyond  itself  to 
the  starry  heavens  of  God's  purposes  that 
encompass  us  and  all  peoples.  Democracy, 
according  to  his  own  great  words,  is  government 
"of  the  people,  by  the  people,  and  for  the  peo- 
ple." If  we  approach  this  problem  either  with- 
out good  red  blood  in  our  veins,  or  without  firm 
intellectual  fiber,  or  without  the  creative  imagi- 
nation, lighted,  if  God  will,  by  glint  of  humor, 
that  fuses  heart  and  brain  and  enables  us  to  put 
ourselves  in  our  brother's  place,  we  have  missed 
the  first  essential  of  the  democratic  spirit. 


1 8       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

We  have  wanted  to  make  you  good  American 
citizens,  first  of  all — vital  members  of  this  great 
pulsating,  living  being  that  we  know  as  our 
democracy — the  vine  of  which  we  are  all  the 
branches.  Do  you  wonder,  therefore,  that  we 
have  striven,  first  of  all,  to  give  you  an  all- 
round  education  which  has  meant  to  the  sweet 
maidenhood  which  you  originally  brought  to 
us 

"That  mind  and  soul,  according  well, 
May  make  one  music  as  before, 
But  vaster." 

A  personality,  alive,  growing,  harmonized 
by  a  supreme  consecration  to  a  great  life- 
purpose,  and  in  vital  relationship  with  other 
personalities — this  was  Lincoln,  and  Lincoln 
was  a  great  democrat. 

What  is  the  essence  of  democracy? 

To  him,  tingling  with  the  blood  that  flowed 
through  the  veins  of  his  nation,  this  problem  was 
also  alive.  It  was  not  a  dead  abstraction,  but 
an  expression  of  the  living  organism  known  as 
the  American  people.  A  government  "of  the 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       19 

people,  by  the  people,  and  for  the  people"- 
what  does  this  mean  in  the  last  analysis?  Nine 
times  out  of  ten  the  answer  that  has  been 
given  is  equality;  democracy  means,  first  and 
foremost,  equality,  which  in  turn  means  an 
artificial  uniformity,  and  so  something  me- 
chanical and  dead. 

John  Graham  Brooks  in  his  book  on  The  Social 
Unrest  has  a  chapter  on  the  Master  Passion 
of  Democracy,  and  that  master  passion  he  con- 
ceives to  be  the  passion  for  equality,  to  be  sure, 
but  not  equality  in  the  usual  sense.  He  speaks 
of  the  various  Utopias,  the  object  of  which  has 
been  to  actualize  among  their  members  an  ex- 
ternal and  so  an  artificial  uniformity.  Among 
more  familiar  and  recent  examples,  he  instances 
Robert  Owen's  attempt  in  Indiana  in  1826  to 
found  a  community  of  equality  and  to  this  end 
he  insisted  that  the  members,  men  and  women 
respectively,  should  wear  a  uniform  and,  be  it 
added,  a  very  unbecoming  uniform,  as  a  result 
of  which  the  men  sulked,  and  the  women  re- 
volted instantly  and  unmistakably,  while  they 
all  promptly  ceased  to  find  anything  agreeable 


2o       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

in  each  other's  society.  Mr.  Brooks  points 
out  very  pertinently  that  all  these  Utopian 
communities  are  necessarily  composed  of  those 
who  have  had  individuality  enough  to  become 
extremely  critical  of  society  as  they  have  ex- 
perienced it,  and  that  they  naturally  bring  to 
the  new  society  individualisms  that  amount  to 
eccentricities.  He  quotes  a  private  letter  from 
a  discouraged  member  of  one  of  these  societies 
to  this  effect:  "We  expected  to  attract  queer 
people,  but  that  there  were  so  many  kinds  of 
queerness  and  that  they  could  be  so  unreason- 
able we  had  to  learn  by  most  disheartening 
experiences." 

De  Tocqueville,  whose  monumental  work  on 
Democracy  in  America  has  not  yet  waxed  old, 
says  that  democratic  peoples  have  a  taste  for 
liberty,  but  an  ardent,  insatiable,  incessant, 
invincible  passion  for  equality — equality  in 
freedom,  equality  in  slavery,  but  equality. 

However,  Mr.  Brooks  points  out  as  an  infer- 
ence from  the  case  just  quoted  that,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  we  don't  want  equality ;  on  the  contrary, 
we  each  of  us  want  to  be  a  little  more  prominent 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       21 

and  a  little  more  distinguished  than  our  fellows. 
In  confirmation  of  this,  let  me  instance  the 
present  American  passion  for  automobiles  which 
seems  to  have  orginated  partly,  at  least,  in  the 
desire  of  the  few  to  go  so  fast  that  everybody  else 
would  have  to  get  out  of  their  way  (the  auto- 
mobile expression  suggests  this  at  any  rate), 
but  which,  such  being  the  leveling  influence  of 
democracy,  seems  destined  to  lapse  into  uni- 
formity again,  because  everybody  is  going  to 
have  one. 

Jesting  aside,  Mr.  Brooks's  contention  is 
certainly  just.  What  we  want  is  not  equality 
in  the  sense  of  a  dead  uniformity,  which  blots 
out  all  individuality;  on  the  contrary,  what  we 
want — and  this  is  a  master  passion  with  us — is 
elbow  room,  breathing  space,  and  in  our  best 
moods,  opportunity  for  everybody.  People 
thrown  together  too  closely,  too  constantly,  too 
narrowly,  and  therefore  too  monotonously,  are 
going  presently  to  find  each  other  unbear- 
able. The  unity  of  the  national  life,  and  part 
passu,  let  us  note,  the  unity  of  the  family  life, 
should  be  so  rich  in  variety  that  the  various 


22       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

temperaments  can  find  room  for  activity. 
"The  apart  instinct, "  concludes  Mr.  Brooks, 
"is  as  powerful  as  the  together  instinct."  All 
forms  of  communism  and  socialism  that  attempt 
to  transgress  this  fundamental  principle  by 
establishing  identity  in  property,  even — save 
the  mark — in  spiritual  property,  or  what  not, 
are  bound  to  go  to  the  wall.  But  when  a 
socialist  like  Mr.  Sydney  Webb,  quoted  by  Mr. 
Brooks,  says:  "We  want  to  bring  about  the 
condition  in  which  every  member  of  society  shall 
have  a  fair  chance  to  use  and  develop  the  gifts 
with  which  he  happens  to  be  born,"  he  is  on 
the  rock  foundation  of  democracy,  whether  here 
or  elsewhere. 

Equality,  in  Mr.  Lincoln's  mind,  never  stood 
for  a  gray  identity  without  difference.  He  never 
was  a  democrat  in  the  sense  that  Walt  Whitman, 
for  example,  was  a  democrat,  as  expressed  by 
one  of  his  sympathetic  critics  in  the  statement 
that  "the  difference  between  the  president 
and  the  Broadway  mason  or  hod  carrier  is 
inconsiderable — an  accident  of  office,"  their 
common  inalienable  humanity  being  the  one 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       23 

important  thing.  Lincoln  was  altogether  too 
sane  a  thinker  to  hold  such  a  view,  although 
Douglas  and  his  adherents  tried  to  make  it 
out  that  he  did  hold  it.  "Invite  a  nigger  to 
dinner, "  was  their  favorite  challenge  of  Lincoln's 
position.  In  reply,  Lincoln  is  at  pains  to  ex- 
plain (Quincy  speech,  1858)  that  any  scheme  of 
perfect  social  and  political  equality  with  the 
negro  is  "but  a  specious  and  fantastical  ar- 
rangement of  words,"  and  declares  that  he 
has  no  purpose  of  trying  to  bring  about  such  a 
state  of  affairs;  on  the  contrary,  he  agrees  with 
Judge  Douglas  that  the  negro  is  not  the  equal  of 
the  white  man  in  many  respects,  certainly  not 
in  color,  perhaps  not  in  intellectual  and  moral 
endowments.  Notwithstanding  all  this,  he 
nevertheless  claims,  with  all  the  earnestness  of 
which  he  is  capable,  that  there  is  no  reason  in 
the  world  why  the  negro  is  not  entitled  to  all  the 
rights  enumerated  in  the  Declaration  of  In- 
dependence— the  right  of  life,  liberty,  and  the 
pursuit  of  happiness.  "I  hold,"  he  adds, 
"that  he  [the  negro]  is  as  much  entitled  to 
these  as  the  white  man."  Unequal  in  color, 


24       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

perhaps  in  endowments,  as  the  negro  may  be, 
according  to  Lincoln,  he  is  the  equal  of  any 
white  man  in  the  right  to  eat  the  bread  which 
his  own  hand  earns,  and  to  eat  it  without  the 
leave  of  anybody  else. 

Hence  this  great  democrat  saw,  more  than 
half  a  century  ago,  what  the  majority  fail  to  see 
to-day,  that  equality  does  not  mean  identity, 
but  rather  the  richest  diversity  in  that,  accord- 
ing to  the  true  interpretation  of  the  Declaration 
of  Independence,  every  man  is  to  have  his  I 
chance — his  own,  and  not  another's. 

Equality,  then,  properly  interpreted,  namely, 
to  give  every  man,  woman,  and  child  a  fair 
chance,  is  indeed  of  the  essence  of  democracy. 

If  you  would  serve  your  country  and  so  con- 
tribute to  the  world's  need  at  the  present  crisis, 
with  what  a  passion  for  service  will  you  go 
forth  to  strive,  with  all  the  strength  of  your 
being,  and  up  to  the  full  measure  of  your  ability  f 
that  every  child  may  be  well  born,  that  every 
child  may  actualize  his  right  to  a  healthy 
normal  physical  life,  that  every  child  may,  so 
far  as  in  him  lies,  enter  into  the  intellectual 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       25 

and  moral  heritage  of  the  race  to  the  end  that 
he  may  realize  his  birthright  to  become  an 
efficient  citizen  of  this  great  commonwealth. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  principle  of  equality, 
thus  vitally  conceived,  as  on  the  rock  founda- 
tion of  democracy.  I  say  on  the  rock  founda- 
tion of  democracy;  for,  to  my  mind,  the 
principle  of  equality,  rightly  interpreted,  inev- 
itably conducts  us  to  a  more  fundamental 
principle  still. 

Why  should  everybody  have  a  chance? 

Why  do  all  just  minds  revolt  at  the  goods  and 
shackles  idea,  *'.  e.,  the  property  idea,  as  applied 
to  the  human  personality?  Why,  except  that 
everything  that  we  know  outside  of  personality 
is  a  means  to  some  end.  Personality  alone  is 
an  end  in  itself.  As  soon  as  and  as  far  as  human 
personality  is  used  first  and  foremost  to  gratify 
some  end  of  another's  instead  of  being  cherished 
for  its  own  sanctity  as  a  good  in  and  of  itself, 
we  immediately  feel  the  profanation  of  it. 
So  long  as  we  clutch  at  each  other,  in  order  to 
minister  to  our  own  greed,  our  own  ambition, 
our  own  selfish  affection  even,  the  slaveholders 


26       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

of  the  south  are  our  natural  brethren,  before 
whom  we  may  indeed  have  occasion  to  bow  the 
head.  §ays  Browning : 

<4  Well,  this  cold,  gray  clod 

Was  man's  heart ; 
Crumble  it,  and  what  comes  next? 
Is  it  God?" 

Thus  reads  that  grand  old  genealogy  in  Luke: 
44  which  was  the  son  of  Seth,  which  was  the  son  of 
Adam,  which  was  the  son  of  God." 

Equality  is  based  on  the  fact  that  you  and  no 
other  can  realize  the  thought  of  God  concerning 
you,  that  God  himself  fails  of  fulfilment  unless 
you  fulfil  your  destiny  as  partaker  of  the  divine 
nature,  thus  performing  your  function  which 
no  other  can  perform.  Here,  indeed,  we  reach 
bedrock  in  our  search  for  the  essence  of  dem- 
ocracy. 

Here,  too,  we  get  the  unifying  principle  that 
binds  together  the  rich  diversity  of  the  un- 
numbered and  innumerable  personalities  in  a 
nation.  "In  God  we  live  and  move  and  have 
our  being." 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       27 

As  most  of  us  have  never  grasped,  in  the  sense 
that  Lincoln  grasped  it,  and  in  the  sense  that 
the  best  thinkers  in  general  have  grasped  it, 
the  vital  idea  of  equality  as  meaning  diversity, 
wealth  of  varying  opportunity,  rather  than  a 
dead  identity,  so  as  a  nation  we  have  been  slow 
to  grasp  the  true  nature  of  the  unifying  bond 
that  holds  the  diversity  of  individuals  in  an 
essential,  unbreakable,  inviolable  oneness.  It 
was  only  as  a  result  of  a  slow  evolutionary 
process  that  the  states  of  this  union  realized 
that  the  union  was  anything  more  or  better  than 
a  contract  to  be  made  and  broken  at  will — a 
mere  formal  and  external  bond.  "As  the  days 
of  a  tree  are  the  days  of  my  people, "  says  Holy 
Writ.  This  is  the  profounder  reading  of  the 
nature  of  the  national  life.  As  the  branches  to 
a  vine,  so  are  the  states  to  the  common  life  of 
the  whole.  "The  nation,"  says  Mulford  in  his 
book  on  The  Nation,  "the  nation  has  unity, 
growth,  identity  of  structure  as  every  organism 
has,"  that  is,  "the  unity  of  the  nation  is  the 
unity  of  an  organism,  not  the  aggregation  of  a 
mass."  This  is  the  reason  why  any  individual 


28       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

state  or  any  individual  person  who  acts  in  isola- 
tion, contrary  to  the  law  of  the  whole,  is  like 
a  dead  limb  that  is  no  longer  of  significance 
because  no  longer  a  living  organism.  "Go,  get 
you  home,  you  fragments,"  quotes  Mulford, 
from  the  words  of  Caius  Marcius  to  the  mob  in 
Shakespeare's  Coriolanus. 

The  proverbial  and  unreasonable  restiveness 
of  Americans  against  authority  shows  how  far 
we  are  from  understanding  the  real  relationship 
that  subsists  between  each  one  of  us  and  the 
nation.  To  break  the  law  of  the  whole  is  to  lift 
murderous  hand  against  the  common  life  that 
courses  through  the  veins  of  each  of  us,  without 
which  we  are  worse  than  nothing,  in  which  we 
alone  can  find  the  fulfilment  of  our  individual 
lives. 

Here  again  the  plummet  of  Lincoln's  thought 
dropped  deep  into  the  heart  of  reality.  "I 
hold,"  he  said,  "that  in  contemplation  of 
universal  law  and  of  the  Constitution,  the 
Union  of  these  states  is  perpetual.  Perpetuity 
is  implied,  if  not  expressed,  in  the  fundamental 
law  of  all  national  governments."  (First  Inau- 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       29 

gural  Address,  1861.)  "It  follows  from  these 
views,"  he  continues,  "that  no  state  upon  its 
own  mere  motion  can  lawfully  get  out  of  the 
Union."  Even,  he  explains,  if  the  nation  were 
not  one  organically,  as  he  has  claimed,  and  the 
association  of  the  states  is  in  the  nature  of  a 
contract  merely,  even  so,  can  it,  as  a  contract,  be 
peaceably  unmade  by  less  than  all  the  parties 
who  made  it?  One  party  to  a  contract  may 
violate  it,  break  it,  so  to  speak;  but  does  it  not 
require  all,  he  asks,  to  lawfully  rescind  it? 
"Plainly,  the  central  idea  of  secession  is  the  es- 
sence of  anarchy, "  so  he  concludes.  Now  we  see, 
as  perhaps  we  have  not  seen  before,  why  Presi- 
dent Lincoln  believed  it  his  duty,  first  and  last  and 
all  the  time,  to  preserve  the  inviolable  life  of  the 
Union.  To  the  seceding  states,  he  says:  "You 
have  no  oath  registered  in  heaven  to  destroy  the 
government,  while  I  shall  have  the  most  solemn 
one  to  preserve,  protect,  and  defend  it." 

I  close  with  a  brief  summary:— 

"God,"  it  has  been  said,  "is  not  a  mere 
disaster-monger."     "Is  bread-corn  crushed  to 


30       The  Essence  of  Democracy 

pieces?  Nay,  not  forever  is  [the  ploughman] 
threshing  it,  or  driving  his  cartwheel  and  his 
horses  over  it;  he  doth  not  crush  it  to  pieces/' 
*'Por  God  doth  instruct  him  aright,  and  doth 
teach  him, "  so  that  "  This  also  cometh  from  the 
Lord  of  hosts,  which  is  wonderful  in  counsel, 
and  excellent  in  wisdom."1 

"That  in  years  that  should  be 
I  would  bring  ye  with  patience  through  scons 
From  slime  through  the  forest  to  bliss; 
I  would  wean  ye  from  clixnbings  and  fury  to  wings 

and  to  wisdom 
From  dark  sea-stupor  to  life."8 

The  end  of  the  present  European  war  is 
constructive,  not  destructive.  The  divine  pur- 
pose is  ever  expressing  itself  in  perpetual  re- 
newals. If  we  have  read  aright  the  signs  of  the 
times,  the  form  that  will  be  taken  by  the  coming 
world-process  of  renewal  and  reconstruction  is 
the  spirit  of  democracy  in  its  essence. 

That  spirit  recognizes,  first  of  all,  the  inviola- 
ble sacredness  of  personality  in  ourselves  and 

1  T.  K.  Cheyne's  translation. 

•  New  Poems,  Midnight — The  jist  of  December,  /poo; 
Stephen  Phillips. 


The  Essence  of  Democracy       31 

in  others  as  individual  expressions  of  the 
divine  life;  hence  it  recognizes  that  no  real 
personal  relationship,  whether  in  friendship,  in 
the  family,  or  in  the  state,  can  be  regarded  as 
something  to  be  made  or  broken  at  will;  if 
broken,  it  means  nothing  short  of  murder — the 
opening  of  the  spiritual  arteries  of  common 
life  through  which  our  own  blood  as  well  as  our 
brother's  ebbs  out  in  a  common  death. 

It  is  said  of  Charles  Lamb  that  one  day  the 
conversation  turned  upon  some  man  who  was 
not  present,  and  Mr.  Lamb,  who  stuttered,  said : 
"I— I— I  hate  that  fellow."  His  friend  said: 
"Charles,  I  didn't  know  you  knew  him."  Lamb 
said:  "I  don't;  I  can't  hate  a  fellow  I  know." 

This  defines  the  general  analogy  of  the  vine 
and  its  branches.  Swinburne  in  his  own  ex- 
quisite fashion  confirms  it : 

"I  am  in  thee  to  save  thee, 

As  my  soul  in  thee  saith ; 
Give  thou  as  I  gave  thee, 

Thy  life-blood  and  breath, 
Green  leaves  of  thy  labor,  white  flowers  of  thy 

thought,  and  red  fruit  of  thy  death."1 
1  Hertha,  A.  C.  Swinburne. 


II 


THE  TWENTIETH-CENTURY  SEARCH 
FOR  THE  HOLY  GRAIL' 

(As  illustrated  by  the  work  of  American  women 
along  economic,  civic,  and  legislative  lines.) 

TENNYSON'S  Idylls  of  the  King  represents 
a  highly  modernized  and  Christianized 
version  of  the  Search  for  the  Holy  Grail. 
Nevertheless  for  the  age  of  feudalism  and  of 
chivalry  theGrail  quest  sounded  the  highest  note 
of  aspiration  and  sanctity  then  known.  In  the 
transformation  of  the  world  from  barbarism 
to  civilization,  it  was  the  most  potent  influence. 
From  a  pagan  magic  vessel,  the  Grail  had  come 
to  mean  the  cup  used  by  Jesus  at  the  last  supper 
— the  wine,  a  symbol  of  his  life-blood,  or,  as 
sometimes  conceived,  a  symbol  of  communion 

1  Address  before  the  State  Federation  of  Women's  Clubs 
at  the  Second  Congregational  Church,  Rockford,  111.,  Novem- 
ber n,  1915. 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        33 

with  him.  Viewed  with  reference  to  what  had 
gone  before,  it  represents  a  decided  step  in 
advance.  It  was  a  vision  of  a  new  heaven  and 
a  new  earth  wherein  dwelleth  righteousness.  It 
was  a  shining  in  the  dark.  But  like  our  visions  to- 
day, it  fell  far  short  in  practical  accomplishment. 
The  Knights  of  the  Round  Table  were  pledged, 
it  is  true,  to  the  service  of  the  poor,  the  weak, 
the  oppressed,  especially  of  women.  But  it  was 
the  act  of  a  superior  who  graciously  tried  to 
correct  what  was  wrong  rather  than  the  act  of 
a  comrade  who  sought  to  build  up  the  social 
order.  The  practical  results  as  shown  in  feu- 
dalism, were  a  system  of  vassalage  and  of  the 
buying  and  selling  of  women  in  marriage. 
Hence  from  our  present  viewpoint,  the  system 
represents  autocracy  over  against  democracy— 
the  privilege  of  the  favored  few  rather  than  the 
rights  of  all. 

The  highest  service  that  a  knight  could  con- 
ceive was  the  finding  of  the  wondrous  and 
sacred  thing  known  as  the  Grail.  Only  a  few 
ever  attained  such  purity  as  to  be  counted 
worthy  to  reach  the  goal  and  to  behold  the 


34        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

Grail  in  its  splendid  reality.  Those  who  went 
on  the  quest  were  obliged,  perforce,  to  leave  the 
common  duties  of  life  to  search  afar  for  this 
mystic  object.  They  had  no  thought  of  bring- 
ing it  back  to  a  needy  world;  at  most,  they 
hoped  to  bring  the  knowledge  of  it  to  a  few 
knights  only.  The  quest  called  for  an  indi- 
vidual righteousness  in  some  sense,  to  be  sure, 
but  contained  no  idea  of  a  common  salvation 
without  which  individual  salvation  is  impos- 
sible, no  organic  idea  of  an  indissoluble  and 
growing  union  between  the  worshiper  and  the 
holy  ideal  that  beckoned  him.  For  this  the 
times  were  not  yet  ripe.  Only  in  a  very  ex- 
ternal sense  can  God  be  said  to  have  become 
an  integral  part  of  human  life.  Religion  was, 
to  a  great  degree,  of  such  stuff  as  dreams  are 
made  of.  Yet  how  does  it  add  to  our  feeling 
of  the  solidarity  of  the  race  to  realize  that 
the  gleam  that  they  followed  is  the  light  that 
is  shining  for  us  and  will  ever  shine  more  and 
more  to  the  perfect  day. 

It  is  a  far  cry  from  these  medieval  concep- 
tions to  the  theology  of  Calvin  in  the  sixteenth 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        35 

century,  revised  for  us  in  this  country  by  Jona- 
than Edwards  in  the  eighteenth  century.  Yet 
the  same  lack  of  wholeness  appears  here  in 
different  form.  Here,  to  be  sure,  the  quest 
is  not  for  a  thing,  no  matter  how  sacred,  but 
for  a  God  who  is  conceived  as  a  spirit  to  be 
worshiped  in  spirit  and  in  truth.  Yet  the 
God  of  Calvin  and  of  Edwards  not  only  domi- 
nates but  annihilates  his  worshipers.  His 
glory  is  the  one  thing  in  heaven  or  earth  that  is 
to  be  desired  or  sought  for.  Personal  salvation 
consists  in  the  wiping  out  of  the  individual 
will  by  submerging  it  in  the  divine  sovereignty. 
In  this  consists  personal  salvation  and  only 
such  can  be  saved  as  God  may  arbitrarily  elect. 
The  favorite  and  ultimate  question,  "Are  you 
willing  to  be  damned  for  the  glory  of  God?" 
indicates  the  further  idea  of  annihilation  rather 
than  of  organization,  life,  development.  Fran- 
cis Thompson  expresses  it  in  The  Hound  of 
Heaven: 

4 'Ah!  is  Thy  love  indeed 
A  weed,  albeit  an  amaranthine  weed 
Suffering  no  flowers  except  its  own  to  mount?" 


36        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

Nevertheless  these  great  men  we  have  been 
discussing  were  God-intoxicated  souls.  One 
must  look  far  for  a  more  exalted  idea  of  the 
beauty  and  wonder  of  the  divine  nature  than 
appears  in  the  pages  of  Jonathan  Edwards. 
Be  it  also  said  that  they  had  an  appreciation 
of  the  human  personality  far  beyond  that  of 
any  of  the  traditional  systems  that  had  pre- 
ceded them.  The  light  they  follow  we  follow 
still. 

"After  it,  follow  it, 
Follow  the  Gleam." 

In  contrast  with  these  ideals  we  have  been 
discussing,  what  is  the  ideal  that  is  unfolding 
in  the  twentieth  century?  Instead  of  the 
theological  God,  so  abhorred  by  Goethe,  who 
created  the  world  and  sent  it  spinning  off  into 
space  to  take  no  further  responsibility  or 
thought  about  it,  we  have  the  idea  of  an  imma- 
nent God  who  is  above  all,  still,  but  through  all 
and  in  all.  It  is  Hegel's  idea  of  a  God  who  has 
come  up  through  the  various  stages  of  the 
evolution  of  his  creation  more  marred  than  any 
man,  "covered  with  the  dust  and  the  blood 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        37 

of  centuries."  It  is  Jesus'  idea  of  a  God  who 
wherever  one  of  his  children  is  hungry  or  thirsty 
or  in  prison  or  cold,  is  hungry  or  thirsty  or 
in  prison  or  cold,  with  his  child.  In  other 
words,  the  modern  ideal  is  of  a  society  that  is 
an  organic  whole  bound  together  into  one  by 
the  transfusion  of  the  divine  life. 

We  see  now  that  no  soul  can  seek  its  own 
salvation  apart  from  the  whole,  that  the  God 
we  worship  is  no  static,  dead  abstraction,  un- 
interesting in  its  fixity  of  perfection  through  the 
aeons,  but  a  God  that  depends  for  his  perfection 
and  his  growth  upon  the  world  that  he  has 
created.  It  is  this  God  that  groaneth  and 
travaileth  in  pain  waiting  for  the  redemption 
of  his  world,  and  who  must  forever  suffer  lack 
while  one  of  his  children  is  wandering  alone  in 
the  darkness  and  the  cold — an  unredeemed  soul. 

However  far  short  we  are  of  realizing  these 
ideals,  I  venture  to  say  that  never  before  in 
the  history  of  the  world  have  they  been  em- 
bodied as  they  are  embodied  in  the  sculpture 
and  mural  paintings  at  the  Exposition  at  San 
Francisco,  which  in  turn  have  been  suggested 


38        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

to  the  artists  who  created  them  by  their  realiza- 
tion in  human  life  to-day,  especially  here  in 
America.  Probably  to  a  later  century  we  shall 
seem  to  fall  as  far  short  as  an  earlier  age  seems 
to  us  to  fall  short.  But  in  San  Francisco  one 
is  thrilled  with  the  conviction  that,  with  all 
our  shortcomings,  this  nation  is  following  on 
to  know  the  Lord. 

It  will  be  my  purpose  in  what  follows  to  show 
that  in  artistic  presentation  at  San  Francisco 
and  in  actual  life,  women  are  participating  and 
are  acknowledged  to  be  participating  more  fully 
now  than  ever  before  in  the  work  of  reconstruc- 
tion and  upbuilding. 

Wells  says1:  "Compared  with  our  older  con- 
tinents, America  is  mankind  stripped  for 
achievement,  because  of  its  detachment  from 
tradition."  "All  America,  north  and  south 
alike,  is  one  tremendous  escape  from  ancient 
obsession  into  activity  and  making.  Naturally 
one  begins  to  do  things,  one  is  inspired  to  do 
things,  one  feels  that  one  has  escaped,  one  feels 
that  the  time  is  now." 

1  The  Passionate  Friends. 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        39 

These  words  give  one  the  feel  of  the  exposi- 
tion in  San  Francisco.  The  completion  of  the 
Panama  Canal  has  sent  a  thrill  of  new  hope  and 
joy  not  only  through  our  own  country,  but 
throughout  the  whole  world  as  well.  The  fine, 
strong  international  note  sounded  in  Chicago 
by  the  Parliament  of  Religions  has  become  so 
dominant  in  the  sculptures  of  the  San  Francisco 
exposition,  that  the  Holy  Grail  of  endeavor  may 
be  sai(l  to  have  become  distinctly  evolved  there 
from  a  national  to  an  international  ideal.  The 
union  of  our  eastern  and  western  coasts  by  the 
Panama  Canal  is  symbolic  of  the  union  of  the 
Orient  and  of  the  Occident.  This  is  typified 
by  the  Court  of  the  Universe  at  San  Francisco. 
This  Court  is  approached  by  two  great  arches, 
one  the  arch  of  the  Nations  of  the  East,  the 
other  the  arch  of  the  Nations  of  the  West, 
facing  each  other.  They  stand  for  the  brother- 
hood of  man.  The  elephant  that  forms  the 
center  of  the  oriental  group  is  balanced  by 
the  prairie  schooner  that  forms  the  center  of  the 
group  of  pioneers  representing  the  west.  On 
the  tongue  of  the  prairie  schooner,  between  the 


40        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

oxen,  is  the  figure  of  a  young  woman,  beautiful, 
strong,  courageous,  womanly.  She  has  a  pro- 
phetic vision  of  the  dangers  and  the  privations 
that  await  her,  but  she  is  undaunted.  Mr. 
Calder,  the  artist  who  created  her,  calls  her 
"The  Mother  of  To-morrow.M  The  hope  of  the 
future  is  represented  by  two  lads,  one  white  and 
the  other  negro.  Note  that,  please,  the  other 
negro.  This  democratic  ideal  brought  out 
constantly  in  the  San  Francisco  exposition, 
fills  one  with  pride  and  joy  and  thanksgiving 
aside  from  any  other  feature  of  it.  It  might 
naturally  be  expected  that  the  credit  for  the 
Panama  Canal  as  the  link  that  unites  the 
Atlantic  and  Pacific,  would  be  given  to  a  per- 
sonification of  capital,  or  to  an  idealized  re- 
presentation of  General  Goethals,  the  great 
engineer  who  has  overcome  every  obstacle,  and 
who  acted  as  leader  and  judge  and  friend  in  the 
whole  enterprise  with  an  almost  absolute  rule, 
where  there  was  no  appeal  except  to  the  Presi- 
dent of  the  United  States.  But  in  a  mural 
painting  under  the  Arch  of  the  Tower  of  Jewels 
called  The  Atlantic  and  Pacific,  by  William  De 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        41 

Leftwich  Dodge,  the  credit  is  not  given  to 
capital,  it  is  not  even  given  to  the  great  leader 
of  the  enterprise,  but  to  labor,  typified  in  a 
splendid,  sinewy,  muscular  form;  and  this  is 
not  only  acknowledged  by  the  artist,  but  ac- 
knowledged by  General  Goethals  himself  in 
his  description  of  his  men  as  "the  best  Ameri- 
cans that  ever  trod  shoe  leather." 

In  further  exemplification  of  the  democratic 
tendencies  of  the  exposition,  one  of  the  most 
interesting  of  the  statues  to  me  was  The  Genius 
of  Creation,  by  Daniel  Chester  French,  among 
the  most  successful,  honored,  and  loved  of 
American  sculptors.  This  statue  represents 
the  genius  of  creation  with  outspread  arms 
against  a  background  formed  by  her  beautiful 
wings  that  rise  above  her  head  and  shadow  her 
face  so  that  its  expression  is  hidden  in  mystery. 
On  one  side,  is  the  figure  of  a  young  man  of 
powerful  physique,  with  fine,  clean-cut  profile, 
and  hands  clenched — an  embodiment  of  the  de- 
sire and  ability  to  achieve.  On  the  other  side, 
is  the  figure  of  a  woman,  her  long  hair  droop- 
ing over  her  face,  her  eyes  looking  into  the 


42        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

distance,  poetical,  dreamy,  meditative,  dream- 
ing dreams  and  seeing  visions.  Behind  the 
statue,  her  hand  reaches  back  and  rests  lightly 
on  the  clenched  fist  of  the  man.  Above  there 
is  an  inscription:  "The  Alpha  and  Omega." 
The  thing  to  be  noted  is  that  the  woman  is 
included  as  an  essential  part  in  the  creative 
force  of  the  universe.  Has  this  ever  been  thus 
publicly  acknowledged  before? 

As  an  expression  of  the  practical  embodiment 
of  this  dream,  I  would  remind  you  of  the 
wonderful  tribute  to  woman's  actual  achieve- 
ment in  the  prominent  position  given  to  the 
young  woman  as  the  Mother  of  To-morrow  in 
the  group  of  the  Nations  of  the  West  already 
described.  Another  statue,  The  Pioneer  Mother, 
by  Charles  Grafley,  occupies  the  place  of  honor 
at  the  entrance  of  the  Palace  of  Fine  Arts  and  is 
of  permanent  bronze.  The  figure  is  of  great 
dignity.  It  scintillates  with  intelligence  and 
power  as  well  as  with  tenderness.  Two  babies 
rest  against  her  confidingly  and  the  inscription 
composed  by  President  Wheeler  of  the  Univer- 
sity of  California  reads :  "  Over  rude  paths  beset 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        43 

with  hunger  and  risk,  she  pressed  on  toward  the 
vision  of  a  better  country.  To  an  assemblage 
of  men  busied  with  the  perishable  rewards  of 
the  day,  she  brought  the  threefold  leaven  of 
enduring  society — faith,  gentleness,  and  home, 
with  the  nurture  of  children." 

I  find  here  a  certain  correction,  perhaps  bet- 
ter an  enlargement  of  French's  vision  in  The 
Genius  of  Creation.  There  the  two  figures  are 
looking  different  ways.  They  are  supplemental, 
but  divided.  One  feels  that,  in  essence,  they  can 
never  thoroughly  understand  each  other.  This 
ignores  one  of  the  most  encouraging  signs  of  the 
times,  namely,  that  the  viewpoint  of  the  man 
and  of  the  woman  are  gradually  approaching 
each  other.  I  speak  here  only  of  the  change 
that  is  taking  place  in  woman.  In  the  con- 
ception of  the  Mother  of  To-morrow  in  the  group 
of  the  Nations  oj  the  West  and  in  The  Pioneer 
Mother  that  I  have  already  described,  we  find 
presages  of  certain  characteristics  now  being 
developed  by  women  that  mean  nothing  short 
of  a  bloodless  revolution  for  the  world  of 
to-morrow. 


44        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

It  is  my  special  purpose  now  to  inquire  in 
detail  how  far  the  great  ideals  expressed  in  the 
exposition  regarding  women,  are  at  present  justi- 
fied by  the  contribution  that  American  women 
have  made  to  American  life.  Many  of  the 
deeper  contributions  of  the  spirit,  represented 
by  President  Wheeler's  idea  of  their  perma- 
nent contribution  to  society  in  faith,  gentleness, 
and  home,  with  the  nurture  of  children,  cannot 
be  handled  and  seen  and  estimated  as  can  the 
results  obtained  along  the  line  of  economics, 
civic  improvement,  and  legislative  reforms. 
Here  he  who  runs  may  read.  Here,  too,  the 
club  women  have  made  their  important  con- 
tribution. It  appears  to  me,  then,  especially 
appropriate  that  it  should  be  discussed  in  this 
presence. 

As  a  preparation  for  any  specific  setting  forth 
of  what  women  have  accomplished  along  these 
lines,  will  you  not  let  me  take  your  hand  and 
will  you  not  go  with  me  into  the  Interpreter's 
House  for  a  little  space  that  we  may  perchance 
orientate  this  woman's  contribution  to  the 
twentieth  century  in  its  relation  to  the  mighty 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        45 

world  movements  and  national  movements 
that  the  Zeitgeist  is  now  unfolding  to  our  gaze? 
To  my  mind,  the  great  struggle  that  is  now 
going  on  across  the  water  has  for  its  rationale 
the  democratizing  of  Europe.  My  conviction 
is  that  it  is  our  most  sacred  duty,  both  men  and 
women,  at  present,  as  contributory  to  this 
great  world  movement,  to  realize  in  our  hearts 
and  lives  the  essential  spirit  of  democracy  and 
to  embody  it  in  the  life  of  our  nation  more  and 
more  completely.  As  Abraham  Lincoln  said: 
"The  spirit  of  democracy  meant  liberty  to  the 
people  of  this  country  and  hope  to  all  the 
world  for  all  time."  It  is  in  essence  an  attitude 
of  mind  and  heart  and  soul.  It  is  not  the 
demand  for  equality;  (it  was  this  idea  that 
brought  a  new  ruin  on  the  South  during  the 
reconstructive  period  as  is  so  vividly  portrayed 
in  The  Birth  of  a  Nation).  The  spirit  of  de- 
mocracy is  a  passionate  yearning  that  everybody 
shall  have  his  proper  chance  to  realize  his  life 
as  God  intended  him  to  live  it.  As  the  matter 
is  probed  deeper  and  we  ask  why  everyone 
should  have  an  equal  chance,  the  answer  comes 


46        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

in  the  sacredness  and  ultimate  value  of  the 
human  personality. 

So  understood  and  so  interpreted,  the  spirit 
of  democracy,  for  a  new  birth  of  which  thr 
world  groaneth  and  travaileth  in  pain  together 
to-day,  is  as  old  as  the  human  race. 

In  this  country  it  has  reappeared  in  a 
movement  which,  of  all  the  new  things  and  the 
new  discoveries  and  the  new  trends  in  society 
during  the  last  twenty-five  years,  will,  I  think, 
be  generally  conceded  as  the  most  characteristic 
and  the  most  important.  1  refer  to  the  evolu- 
tion of  the  social  conscience  in  which  the  spirit 
of  democracy  among  us  has  come  to  flower  and 
fruitage  as  never  before.  Ex-President  Tucker 
of  Dartmouth  in  a  very  thoughtful  article  in 
the  Atlantic  Monthly  for  September,  1915,  on 
"The  Progress  of  the  Social  Conscience/'  says 
that  it  has  changed  "the  angle  of  moral  vision 
so  that  we  see  the  same  things  differently." 
He  compares  it  with  the  new  mental  framework 
furnished  by  the  doctrine  of  evolution  that  so 
reconstructed  the  world  of  thought  in  the 
nineteenth  century.  He  points  out  that  the 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        47 

aim  of  the  social  conscience  has  been  recon- 
structive as  well  as  reformatory.  The  social 
conscience,  in  other  words,  is  a  creative  force. 
What  next  ?  This,  and  please  note  it  carefully : 
"The  actual  progress  which  it  has  made,"  he 
says,  "is  best  reflected  in  the  changes  wrought 
in  public  opinion."  .  .  .  "Public  opinion,  as 
the  governing  force  in  modern  democracy,  is 
the  objective  of  the  social  conscience." 

Have  women  become  a  real  power  to  be 
reckoned  with  in  the  formation  of  public 
opinion?  President  Wilson,  in  a  recent  utter- 
ance, said  that  he  knew  of  no  body  of  persons 
comparable  to  a  body  of  women  for  creating  an 
atmosphere  of  opinion.  In  the  article  I  have 
been  quoting  from  Dr.  Tucker,  he  indicates 
that  in  this  new  development  of  the  social 
conscience  one  of  the  most  novel  and  important 
features  is  the  entrance  of  women  into  the 
responsibilities  and  opportunities  of  civic  life. 
"The  widening  of  the  field  of  investigation  for 
legislative  purposes,"  he  writes,  "is  largely  in 
those  directions  in  which  women  of  trained 
minds  can  best  act  as  experts.  And  many  of 


48        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

the  administrative  positions  created  within  this 
widening  field  under  legislative  supervision 
can  best  be  filled  by  women." 

We  have  long  been  taught  that  man  is  the 
creator  and  woman  the  conserver  in  human 
society.  Initiative  is  the  man's  function. 
Conservation  is  the  woman's  function.  Funda- 
mental and  inexpugnable  physiological  differ- 
ences between  the  man  and  the  woman  have 
been  pointed  out  as  the  ever-active  cause  of 
this  differentiation  in  function  from  the  begin- 
ning of  human  history  even  until  now.  This 
has  given  rise  to  many  utterances  that,  in  the 
face  of  all  the  surprises  that  the  evolutionary 
process  is  unfolding  for  us,  place  a  definite 
limit  on  the  inexhaustible  and  ever-evolving 
life-forces  of  the  universe  as  far  as  women  are 
concerned.  For  example,  Professor  Thorndike 
of  Columbia  says  that  "the  restrictions  of 
woman  to  the  mediocre  grades  of  ability  and 
achievement  should  be  reckoned  with  by  our 
educational  systems." 

The  Nobel  prize,  which  is  given  to  persons 
who  have  contributed  most  materially  to 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        49 

benefit  mankind  during  the  year  preceding  its 
bestowal,  has  a  value  of  about  $30,000.00,  and 
is  given  in  physics,  chemistry,  medicine,  litera- 
ture, and  the  advancement  of  peace.  The  fact 
that  since  the  establishment  of  this  prize  in 
1901,  Madame  Curie,  a  Polish  woman,  received 
the  prize  in  physics  in  1903  conjointly  with  her 
husband,  that  she  received  it  again  (1911)  in 
chemistry  for  what  she  herself  had  done  exclu- 
sively, that  Madame  Bertha  von  Suttner,  an 
Austrian,  received  the  prize  for  her  books  and 
other  efforts  in  the  advancement  of  peace  in 
1905,  that  Selma  Lagerlof  (Swedish)  received 
the  prize  in  literature  in  1909,  ought  to  give  one 
pause  in  uttering  such  prohibitive  ultimatums 
as  that  just  quoted  from  Professor  Thorndike. 

However,  it  is  my  main  purpose  to  confine 
myself  in  this  discussion,  as  I  have  said,  to  the 
economic  forces  set  in  motion  by  women,  since 
here  is  something  that,  though  in  essence  a 
matter  of  the  spirit,  expresses  itself  in  tangible 
results  that  can,  to  a  degree,  be  weighed  and 
measured. 

Mrs.  Cooley,  President  of  the  Chicago  Wo- 


SO        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

man's  Club,  confirms  the  opinion  of  one  of  her 
department  chairmen,  that  the  practical  and 
philanthropic  work  of  the  club  is  vitalized  and 
energized  by  the  contemplation  of  the  ideal 
and  the  beautiful  in  their  study  classes.  Now 
I  wish  to  show  that,  in  keeping  those  two  ele- 
ments combined,  the  club  women  of  this  country 
have  worked  creatively.  Will  you  pardon  me 
at  this  point,  if  I  stop  to  introduce  a  homely 
bit  of  metaphysic,  because  that  alone  will 
justify  my  contention.  Every  part  of  reality 
represents  the  union  of  an  idea  or  an  ideal 
with  an  actual  concrete  situation  into  which  it 
has  been  practically  wrought.  To  illustrate: 
an  abstract  presentation  of  numerical  relations 
such  as  the  relation  of  equality  which  does  not 
carry  the  mind  of  the  child  over  to  particular 
things  that  are  equal,  is  a  dead  abstraction  and 
so  meaningless.  When  it  comes  to  be  a  question 
whether  the  child  will  or  will  not  accept  three 
halves  of  his  neighbor's  apples  for  four  halves 
of  his  own,  there  is  a  change  from  a  dead  to  a 
living  option,  as  James  would  say.  On  the 
other  hand,  a  teacher  may  present  cubes, 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail         51 

straws,  and  the  like,  to  make  real  geometrical 
forms  in  suchwise  that  the  child's  attention  is  so 
absorbed  in  the  bright  colors  and  other  unessen- 
tial details  that  he  altogether  loses  the  meaning. 
Facts  are  dead  without  meaning.  Ideas  are 
dead  until  they  have  been  organically  united 
with  actualities.  Whenever  and  wherever  an 
idea  that  has  been  a  mere  abstraction  or  theory 
has  been  worked  out  in  the  concrete  of  a  given 
situation,  then  something  has  been  brought  into 
the  world  that  was  not  there  before,  that  is, 
something  creative  has  been  done.  To  incar- 
nate an  idea  in  a  given  situation  is  one  of  the 
specific  ways  in  which  the  transcendent  God  of 
the  older  theologies  is  becoming  the  immanent 
God  of  the  twentieth  century. 

The  great  democratic  ideal — that  everyone 
should  have  the  chance  he  is  capable  of  availing 
himself  of — is  not  the  product  of  a  single  mind. 
It  is  the  result  of  the  common  experience  and  the 
common  thinking  of  many  generations.  Even 
to-day  we  but  dimly  comprehend  its  meaning. 
In  the  evolution  of  the  social  conscience,  one  of 
the  great  things  accomplished  by  men  has  been 


52        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

(again  I  refer  to  Dr.  Tucker's  article)  along  the 
lines  of  correcting  and  controlling  monopolies 
by  legislation.  Thereby  they  are  actualizing 
the  abstract  democratic  ideal.  Something  exists 
that  did  not  exist  before.  Hence  they  have 
worked  creatively.  The  creative  work  of  men 
up  to  this  time,  and  for  some  time  to  come, 
must  loom  large  in  comparison  with  the  creative 
work  of  women,  because  through  the  suffrage 
and  through  their  function  as  providers,  they 
have  had  all  the  forces  of  government  and 
of  business  at  their  disposal — an  organized 
dynamic  and  technique  of  action  hitherto 
practically  denied  to  women.  I  am  not  discuss- 
ing here  the  desirability  or  undesirability  of 
woman's  suffrage.  What  I  am  wishing  to 
point  out  is  that  organization  of  some  sort  is 
indispensable,  if  she  ever  convinces  the  world 
of  the  power  of  initiative  that  she  possesses. 
It  is  an  interesting  fact  that  the  formation  and 
growth  of  the  General  Federation  of  Women's 
Clubs  in  this  country  since  1890  is  practically 
synchronous  with  the  evolution  of  the  social 
conscience,  the  connection  between  the  two 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        53 

being  especially  marked  during  the  last  fifteen 
years.  The  history  of  the  General  Federation 
with  its  line  of  noble  presidents,  as  given  by 
Mary  I.  Wood  in  her  book  on  The  History  of 
the  General  Federation  of  Women's  Clubs,  is  a 
wonderful  and  inspiring  story.  Therein  is  set 
forth  the  progress  of  the  women  of  this  coun- 
try away  from  individualism  into  the  idea  of 
4 'working  together  for  the  upbuilding  of  a 
kingdom  on  earth  in  which  each  shall  serve  her 
fellow-creatures  and  all  shall  work  together 
for  the  good  of  the  whole." 

This  steady  progress  of  the  organized  women 
of  the  country  away  from  an  egoistic  unsym- 
pathetic self-assertion  of  the  individual  as  a 
separate  human  atom,  to  the  idea  that  no  soul 
can  be  saved  without  the  common  salvation  of 
all,  to  the  further  idea  that  every  personality 
is  sacrosanct  as  an  expression  of  the  divine, 
represents  the  development  of  one  of  the 
great  forces  of  the  century.  In  place  of  pre- 
judice and  contention,  it  has  brought  union 
and  sympathetic  understanding  and  so  has 
made  woman  a  creative  force  in  the  United 


54        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

States  that  is  not  only  winning  recognition, 
but  compelling  it  by  indisputable  practical 
demonstration. 

Specifically,  what  have  women  done  to  realize 
the  spirit  of  democracy  as  expressed  in  the 
social  conscience? 

For  the  information  that  follows,  I  am  in- 
debted to  a  book  that  has  just  been  published 
in  the  National  League  series  written  by  Mary 
Ritter  Beard  on  Woman's  Work  in  Munici- 
palities. Sometime  I  hope  that  such  books  will 
not  have  to  be  written.  Sometime  I  hope  that 
there  will  be  no  necessity  for  such  an  address 
as  I  am  giving  you  to-day,  because  the  construc- 
tive ability  of  women  will  be  fully  recognized, 
and  because  men  and  women  will  be  working 
together  for  the  good  of  society  with  such 
sympathetic  understanding  that  it  will  be 
impossible  to  assign  any  given  result  to  one 
rather  than  to  the  other,  since  their  common 
endeavor  will  be  like  the  seamless  coat  of  Jesus 
that  could  not  be  torn  one  part  from  another, 
without  ceasing  to  be  at  all.  But,  at  present, 
such  a  book  as  Mrs.  Beard's  and  such  an  ad- 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        55 

dress  as  this  are  necessary,  in  order  to  demon- 
strate the  still  supposedly  undemonstrated  and 
undemonstrable  theory  that  women  can  work 
creatively. 

Let  it  be  fully  understood,  from  beginning 
to  end  of  this  address,  that  the  work  done  by 
women  is  here  regarded  as  only  one  expression 
of  the  great  world-wide  humanitarian  move- 
ment that  has  been  gathering  force  for  the  last 
twenty-five  years.  The  contribution  made  by 
women  and  by  club  women  must  be  distinctly 
envisaged  as  a  part  of  a  whole  in  which  men 
and  women  are  working  together. 

In  this  country,  the  inception  of  the  social 
movement  is  to  be  found  in  the  social  settle- 
ments. Here  men  and  women  have  indeed 
worked  together.  But  with  the  shining  name 
of  Jane  Addams  (one  of  the  graduates  of  Rock- 
ford  College,  by  the  way)  as  the  founder  of  the 
first  and  certainly  one  of  the  greatest  social 
settlements  in  this  country  in  1889,  Miss  Lillian 
Wald  as  the  president  of  the  National  Federa- 
tion of  Settlements,  Vida  Scudder,  Professor 
at  Wellesley,  an  active  promoter  of  the  cause, 


56        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

and  innumerable  other  women  as  the  heads  or 
earnest  co-workers  in  these  organizations,  I 
think  we  may  say  that  women  must  at  least  be 
regarded  as  co-workers  with  men,  such  as 
Graham  Taylor,  Robert  Woods,  and  many 
others,  in  the  creative  work  that  has  been  ac- 
complished. In  1906  there  were  three  times  as 
many  women  as  men  engaged  in  settlement 
work  and  the  proportion  is  probably  not  greatly 
different  at  present.  Over  four  hundred  of 
these  settlements  have  now  been  established 
in  two  thirds  of  the  States  of  the  Union.  "It 
is  not  too  much  to  say,"  says  Dr.  Tucker, 
"that  the  influence  which  emanated  from  these 
social  centers  has  been  the  leaven  of  social 
reform  in  our  cities."  The  need  of  recreation, 
child  welfare,  instruction  of  mothers  in  the 
physical  basis  of  well-being  and  morals,  the 
possible  co-operation  of  home  and  school, 
represent  some  of  the  outstanding  activities  of 
the  settlements.  Miss  Elsa  Dennison  in  a  book 
called  Helping  School  Children,  quoted  by  Mrs. 
Beard,  has  shown  how  these  activities  have 
gone  over  from  the  settlement  to  the  school 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        57 

so  that  at  present  the  school  is  becoming  "one 
huge  settlement  with  a  thoroughly  democratic 
basis  instead  of  a  philanthropic  foundation," 
just,  as  we  shall  presently  see,  the  city  is  being 
changed  from  a  mere  lodging  place  to  a  great 
home  for  its  citizens.  Thus  to  the  general 
movement  in  modern  society,  from  charity  to 
justice,  from  the  ameliorating  of  conditions  to  a 
determination  of  the  cause  of  the  evil  and  the 
change  of  social  conditions  that  have  brought 
it  about,  women  have  made  their  substantial 
contribution. 

If  creative  work  has  been  done  by  our  nation 
in  converting  the  Spanish  dream  of  the  Panama 
Canal  into  the  actual  Panama  Canal,  then 
creative  work  has  been  done  by  the  settlements 
and  by  the  women  perhaps  more  prominently 
than  the  men  in  assimilating  the  beautiful  dream 
of  the  Nazarene  as  set  forth  by  the  parable  of 
the  good  Samaritan,  and  in  realizing  it  in  our 
democracy  to-day  as  the  settlements  have 
helped  to  realize  it. 

The  care  of  the  child  from  infancy  on  through 
adolescence  has  always  been  the  natural  and 


58        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

special  care  of  the  women.     How  has  this  be- 
come democratized? 

Passing  by  many  eminent  names  of  women 
who  have  been  hard  workers  and  scientific 
investigators  along  these  lines  in  the  Ameri- 
can Association  for  the  Study  and  Preven- 
tion of  Infant  Mortality,  I  may  mention 
the  Federal  Children's  Bureau,  the  establish- 
ment of  which  has  been  so  often  and  so  re- 
peatedly urged  by  different  club  women  and 
finally  by  the  whole  Federation.  Julia  Lathrop, 
a  Rockford  woman  whom  we  all  delight  to 
honor,  has  been  made  its  head.  She  found  that 
as  a  matter  of  fact  we  know  nothing  accurately 
on  the  subject  of  infant  mortality,  as  not  a  single 
state  or  city  in  the  United  States  has  the  data 
for  a  correct  statement.  The  Bureau  is  now 
getting  out  a  series  of  monographs,  a  statement 
as  to  the  efforts  being  made  in  cities  of  50,000 
or  over  to  reduce  mortality,  a  study  of  pre- 
natal care  (made  at  the  request  of  the  Congress 
of  Mothers),  a  review  of  child  labor  legislation 
in  the  United  States,  etc.  Miss  Lathrop 's  plan 
is  to  have  the  actual  investigating  done  by 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        59 

committees  of  women,  in  most  instances  mem- 
bers of  the  General  Federation  of  Women's 
Clubs.  Dr.  Sherwood,  Dr.  Harriet  L.  Lee,  Dr. 
Helen  Putnam,  and  others,  all  trained  and  able 
women,  are  acting  as  chairmen  of  these  com- 
mittees. What  work  could  more  effectively 
actualize  the  hope  of  Jesus  when  he  said: 
"Suffer  the  little  children  to  come  unto  me  and 
forbid  them  not"? 

Time  fails  to  tell  of  the  many  practical  exhibits 
in  child  welfare  and  city  welfare  gotten  up  by 
women, — a  most  effective  and  practical  means 
for  bringing  about  reform, — of  their  efforts  con- 
cerning child  labor,  of  the  open  air  schools  and 
of  the  playgrounds  that  their  efforts  have 
brought  into  being,  of  the  investigations  of 
dance  halls,  fifteen  hundred  of  these  investiga- 
tions having  been  made  by  women  officers  in 
Chicago  alone,  with  successful  results  in  securing 
propriety  and  obedience  to  law.  Jane  Addams's 
book  on  The  Spirit  of  Youth  and  the  City  Streets 
has  been  a  most  influential  factor  along  these 
lines. 

In  their  efforts  in  behalf  of  the  children, 


60        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

women  have  had  the  necessity  of  municipal 
housekeeping  forced  upon  them.  Franklin 
MacVeagh  says:  "The  women  of  Chicago 
started  every  one  of  the  fifty-seven  civic  im- 
provement centers  of  the  city."  In  almost 
every  city  women  have  been  behind  this  move- 
ment. "There  is  scarcely  a  town  in  Illinois, " 
says  Mrs.  Beard,  "where  women  are  not  plan- 
ning wholesome  recreation  for  girls  and  boys." 
Pure  milk,  pure  water  (notably  in  New  Orleans 
under  the  leadership  of  Kate  Gordon),  pure 
food,  cheap  ice,  clean  streets  ("volumes  con- 
cerning women  and  •  clean  streets  could  be 
written*')  have  become  actualities,  time  and 
again,  through  their  efforts.  They  have  con- 
ducted anti-fly,  anti-smoke,  and  anti-mosquito 
campaigns.  Mrs.  Beard  has  demonstrated  in 
her  book  the  truth  of  her  statement  that  the 
subject  of  public  health  has  been  broadened 
into  a  democratic  and  governmental  point  of 
view  by  women.  They  have  made  a  real 
contribution  in  perfecting  the  machinery  by 
which  democracy  may  lay  the  foundation  of 
health,  happiness,  and  power.  In  many  of  these 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        61 

activities,  it  is  only  fair  to  say  in  passing  that 
the  Woman's  Christian  Temperance  Union  has 
done  yeoman's  service  side  by  side  with  the 
regular  woman's  clubs;  also  that  in  all  these 
things  women  are  working  side  by  side  with 
men,  as  well  as  independently. 

In  a  further  effort  toward  democratizing 
our  commonwealth,  women  have  worked  for 
and  obtained  special  care  and  special  educa- 
tional opportunities  for  crippled  children,  for 
mentally  defective  children,  for  blind  children, 
for  colored  children,  for  tubercular  children, 
and  for  foreigners.  They  have  worked  for  vo- 
cational training  in  the  public  schools,  for 
manual  training  schools,  for  night  schools,  for 
truant  and  parental  schools,  and  open  air 
schools.  There  are  now  four  hundred  and 
ninety-five  women  county  superintendents 
in  the  United  States.  Four  states,  Colorado, 
Idaho,  Washington,  Wyoming,  have  women  at 
the  head  of  the  state  school  systems.  The 
work  of  Catharine  Waugh  McCulloch,  a  Rock- 
ford  College  graduate,  in  Evanston,  of  Dr. 
Katherine  Davis,  Commissioner  of  Corrections 


62        Search  for  the  Holy  Grail 

in  New  York  City,  of  Mrs.  M.  Gordon  McCouch 
of  Dallas,  Texas,  of  Mrs.  Mary  Bartelme, 
"an  acute,  well-trained  lawyer,"  judge  of  the 
court  for  delinquent  girls  in  Chicago,  the  work 
of  the  Juvenile  Protective  Association  in  Chi- 
cago, the  work  of  club  women  all  over  the  coun- 
try for  the  establishment  of  juvenile  courts — all 
this  needs  only  to  be  called  to  mind  to  prove 
the  truth  of  the  statement  that  women  have  in- 
troduced the  spirit  of  social  service  into  legal 
procedure. 

Is  all  this  merely  a  work  of  conservation  ? 

As  an  offering  to  our  beloved  Republic, 
women  have  brought  live  children  instead  of 
dead  children,  happy  and  healthy  and  trained 
children  instead  of  diseased  and  ignorant  and 
criminal  children.  To  the  body  politic,  they 
have  brought  cleanliness  in  place  of  filth,  beauty 
in  place  of  ugliness,  joy  in  place  of  heaviness. 

"Red  blood  and  warmth  and  laughter," 
"beauty,  romance,  and  splendor,"  have  they 
added  to  life  in  ways  that  can  be  demonstrated, 
in  results  that  can  be  seen  and  handled  and 
touched. 


Search  for  the  Holy  Grail        63 

"I  am  come  that  they  might  have  life  and 
that  they  might  have  it  more  abundantly," 
said  Jesus.  Has  anybody  ever  had  the  temerity 
to  claim  that  such  work  is  not  creative,  that  it  is 
merely  conservative? 

How  grandly  has  the  transcendent  God  of 
the  eighteenth  and  even  of  the  nineteenth 
century  become  the  immanent  God  of  the 
twentieth  century  through  these  devoted  efforts 
of  the  women  of  our  country!  In  thus  incar- 
nating the  spirit  of  democracy  and  the  spirit 
of  social  service  in  our  commonwealth,  American 
women  are  participating  in  the  great  world 
movement  toward  a  new  incarnation  of  the 
deity. 


Ill 

THE  EFFICIENCY  OF  DEMOCRACY1 

"For  the  spirit  of  the  living  creature  was  in  the 
wheels."     Ezekiel  i.,  20. 

EFFICIENCY  means  the  ability  to  bring 
the  best  to  pass  in  a  given  situation 
with  the  least  possible  expenditure  of 
time,  effort,  money,  and  power,  and  a  minimum 
of  waste,  whether  psychical  or  physical. 
' '  Efficiency , "  says  Edward  Earle  Purington, 
Director  of  the  Efficiency  Service  of  the 
Independent,  "efficiency  is  the  science  of  self- 
management."2  That  is  to  say,  self -manage- 
ment is  the  modus  operandi  by  which  we  may 
so  evolve,  conserve,  and  direct  our  powers  as 
to  be  of  the  greatest  possible  use  to  our  day  and 
generation. 

1  Baccalaureate  Address,  June  u,  1916. 

•  Efficient  Living,  Robert  M.  McBride  &  Co.,  1915. 

64 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     65 

This  is  efficiency  from  the  viewpoint  of 
democracy. 

Efficiency,  on  the  other  hand,  if  we  may 
summarize  the  German  credo  on  the  subject, 
'  is,  as  to  method,  the  science  of  state  control. 

This  is  efficiency  from  the  viewpoint  of  an 
autocracy. 

Purington  goes  on  to  show  that  we  are  far 
from  having  realized  the  ideal  of  efficiency  in 
this  country.  He  points  out  that  it  is  estimated 
that  seventy-three  men  out  of  every  hundred 
are  in  the  wrong  job;  that  most  men  utilize 
only  about  a  third  of  their  mental  and  spiritual 
forces;  that  from  20  to  40  per  cent,  of  the  mo- 
tion in  the  average  kitchen  is  lost  motion ;  that 
one  dollar  out  of  every  five  spent  on  the  house- 
hold is  wasted;  that  our  business  firms  lose 
$100,000,000.00  a  year  through  ineffective 
advertising ;  that  in  the  United  States  there  are 
always  3,000,000  persons  on  the  sick  list ;  that  the 
number  of  preventable  deaths  each  year  is 
63,000;  that  the  annual  waste  from  preventable 
death  and  disease  is  $1,500,000,000.00;  and 
that  somewhere  in  this  country  a  workman  is 


66     The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

being  killed  every  four  minutes,  and  another 
being  injured  every  four  seconds.  This,  of 
course,  is  only  an  estimate,  but  I  am  told  it 
is,  in  several  of  its  specifications,  probably  an 
underestimate. 

So  far  forth,  the  efficiency  of  democracy  ap- 
pears to  be  the  inefficiency  of  democracy. 

As  to  the  status  in  Germany,  in  contrast  to 
all  this  writers,  like  Frederic  C.  Howe  in  his 
book  on  Socialized  Germany, l  point  out  that  the 
human  waste  that  is  occurring  in  this  country 
is,  to  a  great  extent,  being  avoided  in  Germany : 

(i)  Because  of  the  incomparable  system 
of  education  provided  and  to  a  degree  enforced 
by  the  state,  including  universities,  gymnasia, 
technical  schools,  commercial  colleges,  schools  of 
industrial  art,  of  artistic  handicraft,  of  manual 
dexterity,  of  business  organization,  and  of  state- 
craft, which  enable  several  hundred  thousand 
students  every  year  to  specialize  to  the  last" 
degree  along  every  line  of  thought,  science,  and 
industry,  efficiency  in  industry  being  further 
promoted  by  the  fact  that  the  state  sends  men 

1  Charles  Scribner's  Sons,  1915. 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     67 

to  spend  years  in  England,  America,  and  the 
German  colonies  to  learn  manufactures  and  the 
detailed  wants  of  the  most  distant  markets. 
The  possibility  of  the  round  peg  in  the  square 
hole  is  thus  reduced  to  a  minimum,  since  the 
individual,  within  limitations  to  be  noted  here- 
after, has  a  chance  to  learn  what  he  can  do  best 
and  how  he  can  do  it  most  efficiently. 

(2)  Because  of  insurance  laws  against  acci- 
dent, invalidity,  sickness,  and  old  age.  When  a 
working  man  is  out  of  work  through  no  fault 
of  his  own,  the  state  frequently  looks  up  work  for 
him.  When  sick,  he  is  taken  care  of  by  the 
state  in  wonderful  convalescent  homes,  tubercu- 
losis hospitals,  etc.  These  insurance  funds 
are  maintained  in  general  by  enforced  contri- 
butions from  the  working  men,  the  employers, 
and  the  community.  "State  concern  for  the 
dependent  classes,"  says  Howe,  "has  been  the 
traditional  policy  of  Prussia  for  centuries." 
"The  state  has  its  finger  on  the  pulse  of  the 
worker  from  the  cradle  to  the  grave."  The 
right  kind  of  work,  not  too  much  of  it,  and 
work  done  under  sanitary  conditions,  is  the  aim. 


68     The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

(3)  Because  of  the  perfection  of  technical 
equipment  and  improvement  of  the  organiza- 
tion of  economic  labor,  the  state  has  lifted 
millions  out  of  material  misery  and  has  opened 
higher  values  of  life  to  them.  So  writes  Karl 
Helfferich  in  his  monograph  on  Germany's 
Economic  Progress.  He  emphasizes  the  fact  that 
one  of  the  Kaiser's  great  contributions  to  the 
public  good  has  been  his  striking  comprehen- 
sion of  the  close  connection  between  technical 
achievement  and  the  natural  sciences.  Applied 
science,  the  application  of  scientific  principles 
to  given  concrete  situations  with  a  definite 
purpose  to  be  accomplished,  the  co-operation  of 
the  German  scholar  with  the  German  business 
man  and  artisan — this  has  meant  unprecedented 
efficiency  in  the  economic  world. 

The  German  mind  is  set  against  waste, 
whether  in  human  material  or  economic  product. 
On  a  territory  smaller  than  Texas,  they  support 
a  population  of  about  64,000,000  as  over  against 
our  population  of  about  100,000,000.  They 
stand  for  unity,  uniformity,  perfection,  orderli- 
ness, finish 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     69 

Is  this,  then,  the  efficiency  of  an  autocracy? 

Professor  Patten  of  the  University  of  Penn- 
sylvania in  a  very  thoughtful  article  in  the 
Survey  (March  6,  1915)  discusses  the  philosophy 
that  underlies  the  facts  I  have  been  citing  regard- 
ing German  efficiency  versus  American  effi- 
ciency or  the  lack  of  American  efficiency.  He 
says  that  political  and  moral  freedom  has 
been  the  goal  of  endeavor  in  this  country, 
while  the  public  weal  has  been  the  goal  in  Ger- 
many. Every  economic  advance  carries  with 
it,  he  points  out,  an  increase  of  mechanical 
action,  and  by  this  he  seems  to  mean  the  per- 
fection, not  only  of  material  machinery,  but  the 
perfection  of  the  political  and  social  mechanism 
of  the  state.  He  thinks  that  economic  progress 
here  as  elsewhere  must  mean  an  evolution  from 
the  status  of  freedom  to  that  of  welfare.  He 
realizes  that  it  is  going  to  be  difficult  for  Ameri- 
cans to  accept  this,  as  most  of  us  would  say: 
"Better  a  day  of  freedom  than  an  age  of  au- 
tomatic regularity."  Somehow  or  other,  he 
feels  that  in  this  country  we  must  unite  the  two 
.ideals .of  welfare  and  freedom. 


70     The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

Is  German  efficiency,  as  above  briefly  de- 
scribed, contradictory  in  theory  and  practice  to 
the  democratic  idea? 

Before  answering  this  question,  we  must 
complete  the  picture  of  German  efficiency.  It 
gives,  as  Howe  points  out,  industrial  freedom, 
but  not  personal  and  political  freedom. 

While  a  distinction  should  be  made  between 
northern  and  southern  Germany,  in  favor  of  cer- 
tain marked  democratic  tendencies  in  southern 
Germany,  especially  in  local  city  self-govern- 
ment, it  can  hardly  be  disputed  that  Germany, 
as  a  whole,  is  ruled,  and  that  to  an  increasing 
degree,  by  the  great  estate  owners  of  Prussia. 
Untouched  politically  by  the  French  Revolution, 
which  so  profoundly  influenced  various  Euro- 
pean countries,  Prussia,  and  through  Prussia  Ger- 
many as  a  whole,  according  to  Howe,  represents 
the  eighteenth-century  idea  of  the  feudal  state. 
But  it  is  a  feudal  state  with  the  viewpoint  of 
a  benevolent  paternalism  adapted  to  modern 
conditions.  Nowhere,  according  to  the  same 
author,  does  the  state  do  so  much  for  the 
individual.  The  devotion  of  the  people  to  the 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     71 

fatherland  is  in  part  explained,  says  the  same 
author,  by  the  devotion  of  the  fatherland  to 
the  people.  The  state  is  concerned  with  the 
health,  education,  comfort,  and  efficiency  of  the 
people.  This  is  not,  however,  for  the  sake  of 
the  individual,  but  for  the  sake,  primarily,  of 
the  state.  No  other  nation  has  so  completely 
subordinated  the  individual  to  the  state.  Caste 
is  found  everywhere.  The  state  freely  provides 
an  education  to  the  individual,  but  the  state 
decrees  that  the  child,  save  in  exceptional  cases, 
must  be  educated  for  the  station  in  life  to  which 
he  is  born.  The  career  of  an  Abraham  Lincoln 
would  hardly  be  thinkable  under  such  a  system. 
State  censorship  of  the  universities,  of  the  press, 
and  of  the  church,  precludes,  save  within  limits 
laid  down  by  the  state,  freedom  of  thought, 
freedom  of  conscience,  and  freedom  of  speech — 
the  bedrock  of  our  democracy. 

Howe  emphasizes  the  fact  that  Germany's 
freedom  is  in  the  economic  field  and  ours  in  the 
political  field .  He  believes  that  there  is  nothing 
essentially  undemocratic  in  the  economic  wel- 
fare and  efficiency  of  the  individual  in  Germany. 


72      The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

That  there  is  nothing  essentially  undemo- 
cratic in  public  education  and  compulsory  public 
education,  we  are  the  last  people  to  deny.  It  is 
an  integral  part  of  our  democratic  system. 
That  we  can  and  must  learn  of  Germany  in 
making  our  educational  system  more  thorough, 
more  far-reaching,  and  more  complete  than  it  is 
at  present,  is,  to  my  mind,  the  handwriting  on 
the  wall,  if  we  as  a  democracy  would  keep  our 
place  in  the  sun,  both  politically  and  com- 
mercially, as  over  against  a  feudal  state  like 
Germany.  That  the  individual  should  be  de- 
veloped to  his  highest  potency  because  fitted 
by  education  to  fulfil  his  function,  as  well  as 
that  economically  he  should  have  his  chance, 
are,  in  their  very  essence,  democratic  ideals. 

So  far  as  Germany  succeeds  in  doing  this,  as 
neither  we  nor  any  other  country  succeed  in 
doing  it,  we  must  look  for  the  efficiency  of  the 
democratic  ideal  in  Germany  rather  than  in 
America.  But  the  method  and  the  spirit  in 
which  it  is  accomplished  cannot  be  reconciled 
with  democracy,  for  that  method  and  spirit 
is  to  iron  out  the  individual  except  in  so  far 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     73 

as  the  cultivation  of  this  individual  is  useful 
to  the  state,  and  this  means,  mainly,  so  far 
as  the  individual  is  economically  useful  to  the 
state. 

The  German  state  is,  by  general  consent,  a 
vast  mechanism.  It  runs  with  all  the  finish, 
the  smoothness,  the  perfection  of  machinery. 
It  is  impossible  from  the  very  nature  of  the  case 
that  any  such  perfect  and  rapid  results  can 
be  attained  in  a  democracy,  where  the  state 
exists  primarily  for  the  individual,  not  the 
individual  for  the  state,  where  there  is  not  one 
centralized  external  authority  that  controls  the 
whole,  but  where  the  individual  is  expected  to 
exercise  self-control,  and  uniformity  of  action 
can  be  attained  only  through  the  education  of 
public  opinion  and  personal  loyalty  thereto  that 
shows  itself  in  obedience  to  the  laws  it  enacts. 

The  other  day  I  saw  a  leaf  seized  by  the 
wind  and  driven  swift  and  straight  across  the 
road.  And  a  little  farther  on  I  saw  some  tiny 
birds  also  crossing  the  road.  They  turned 
this  way  and  that  picking  up  seeds  as  they 
went,  full  of  the  joy  of  life,  and  by  and  by  they 


74      The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

got  across.  Was  the  welfare  of  the  leaf  neces- 
sarily greater  than  the  welfare  of  the  birds,  or 
was  the  sum-total  of  success  necessarily  on  the 
side  of  the  leaf  rather  than  on  the  side  of  the 
birds?  Between  a  community  of  birds  de- 
veloped, comparatively  speaking,  by  self -activ- 
ity, and  a  community  of  dead  leaves  driven  by 
the  wind,  it  would  not  take  us  long  to  decide 
as  to  relative  superiority. 

We  have  much  to  learn  from  Germany  as  to 
what  the  democratic  ideal  demands  by  way  of 
economic  efficiency.  There  is  nothing  in  the 
democratic  ideal  that  is  going  to  prevent  us  from 
profiting  by  her  example  if  we  will,  although  we 
may  not  be  able  to  go  so  far  or  go  so  fast  as  she 
has  done. 

On  the  other  hand,  political  and  personal 
freedom  are  impossible  in  a  feudal  state  like 
Germany. 

In  other  words,  there  is  in  democracy  an  in- 
herent power  to  correct  its  own  mistakes  and 
deficiencies.  In  an  autocracy,  no  such  power 
that  is  at  all  comparable  with  it,  can  from  the 
nature  of  the  case  exist. 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     75 

It  is  yet  to  be  proved,  we  hear  again  and 
again,  whether  a  democratic  form  of  govern- 
ment is  really  superior  to  an  autocratic  form  of 
government. 

If  this  means  that  it  is  yet  to  be  proved 
whether  the  democratic  nations  are  going  to 
wake  up  and  learn  how  to  do  things  well  enough 
to  cope  with  a  highly  organized  efficient  autoc- 
racy like  Germany,  it  may  well  be  true.  If  it 
means  that  democracy,  in  its  essence,  is  to-day 
in  point  of  superiority  on  trial  as  over  against 
an  autocracy  in  its  essence,  it  is  untrue. 

Would  anybody  seriously  maintain  that  the 
superiority  of  the  status  of  contract  between 
freeman  and  freeman  on  which  our  modern 
business  world  is  built,  is  still  open  to  question 
versus  the  superiority  of  slavery  where  a  man 
was  a  chattel  and  belonged  to  his  master  in  the 
same  sense  as  did  his  horse  or  his  house,  or  of 
the  qualified  slavery  of  feudalism  where  a  man 
was  sold  by  his  baronial  lord  with  the  estate 
he  helped  to  till?  If  progress  throughout  the 
evolution  of  human  society  has  been  marked 
in  all  its  stages  by  an  increase  in  personal 


76      The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

liberty,  how  can  we  question  the  relative  su- 
periority, in  essence,  of  a  great  democracy  like 
our  own  which  is  built  on  the  foundations  of 
personal  liberty  and  of  a  great  mechanism,  com- 
paratively speaking  at  least,  like  the  German 
autocracy?  There  is  the  whole  diameter  of 
being  betwixt  the  two. 

But,  it  will  be  urged,  that  is  the  very  pith  of 
the  argument  that  the  unrestrained  clash  of 
individual  interests  does  bring  about  economic 
slavery  in  a  democracy.  Moreover,  this  is  an 
age  of  machinery.  If  we  escape  an  all-powerful 
governmental  machinery,  yet  we,  in  common 
with  all  civilized  nations,  are  in  danger  of  re- 
ducing free  men  to  slavery  again  by  the  prev- 
alence of  physical  machinery  that  takes  away 
individual  initiative  and  constructive  thought, 
and  reduces  the  worker  to  a  slave  as  truly  as 
slavery  ever  did.  Neither  a  democratic  nor 
an  autocratic  government  can  save  us  from 
this. 

Shall  we  then  turn  the  wheel  of  progress 
backward  to  a  non -mechanical  age?  Surely 
not.  As  machinery  delivered  man  from  slavery 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     77 

to  begin  with,  so,  as  Wundt1  points  out,  the  new 
slavery  with  which  machinery  now  in  turn 
threatens  the  world  by  destroying  initiative 
and  intelligent  workmanship  can  only  be  done 
away  with  by  more  and  more  machinery,  until 
all  men  have  sufficient  leisure  to  give  them  the 
opportunity  to  live  and  to  live  happily  and 
well. 

In  this  era  of  machinery,  what,  then,  can 
save  the  individual  life  from  extinction?  Per- 
haps we  shall  discover  here  how,  as  a  democracy, 
we  may  reap  the  benefits  of  an  autocracy  and 
still  save  our  souls  alive. 

How  can  we  unite  the  two  ideals  of  welfare 
and  of  freedom?  Can  we  attain  a  clearer 
vision  of  the  true  democratic  ideal  by  a  com- 
bination of  the  German  ideal  and  the  American 
ideal  than  by  treating  them  as  altogether 
antithetical  and  antagonistic?  This  is  an  old 
question  under  a  new  form. 

From  the  days  of  Hamilton  and  Jefferson 
even  until  now,  the  politics  of  this  country  have 

1  Facts  of  the  Moral  Life.  Translated  by  Edward  B.  Titchener 
and  Julia  H.  Gulliver.  Macmillan  Co. 


78      The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

swung  to  and  fro  between  the  centralization  of 
authority  in  the  general  government  and  local 
self -management.  Somehow  or  other,  we  have 
known  that  they  must  be  united  into  an  organic 
whole.  Our  national  motto,  E  pluribus  unum, 
has  in  it  the  fathomlessness  and  inexhaustible- 
ness  of  the  divine  purposes.  A  government 
with  such  a  motto  can  never  take  on  primarily 
the  characteristics  of  a  mechanism.  Rather 
"As  the  days  of  a  tree  are  the  days  of  my 
people."  "I  find  no  similitude  so  true  as  this 
of  a  Tree,"  says  Carlyle — "its  boughs  with 
their  buddings  and  disleafings — events,  things 
suffered,  things  done.  ..."  "Is  not  every 
leaf  of  it  a  biography?" 

A  living,  breathing,  throbbing  common  life 
that  finds  self-expression  in  every  part,  as  each 
part  finds  self-expression  in  the  life  of  the 
whole — this  is  democracy. 

The  national  organism  is  a  spiritual  organism 
and  so  outruns  even  the 'similitude  of  the  tree, 
since  the  personalities  of  which  it  is  composed 
are  individual  expressions  of  the  divine  life 
and  so  are  of  ultimate  and  absolute  value  in 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     79 

themselves.  How  can  this  spiritual  organism 
attain  the  benefits  of  a  great  mechanism  like 
the  German  government  and  still  remain  true 
to  itself? 

Our  discussion  suggests  that  economically 
the  individual  can  be  developed  to  his  highest 
potency  only  by  a  mechanism — a  centralized 
authority  that  will  do  away  with  the  un- 
restrained clashing  of  individual  and  local 
interests.  Is  industrial  freedom  reconcilable 
with  personal  and  political  freedom?  How 
are  the  two  ideas  of  economic  welfare  and 
freedom  to  be  united? — for  if  Professor  Patten 
is  right,  economic  welfare  must  result  and  can 
only  result  from  a  growing  perfection  of  politi- 
cal and  social  mechanism  as  well  as  of  physical 
machinery. 

Machinery  we  must  have.  The  only  escape 
must  be  through  our  attitude  toward  machinery 
— physical  and  governmental.  Gerald  Lee  in 
an  article  on  "The  Machine  Trainers"  in  the 
February  Atlantic  of  1913  asks  this  pertinent 
question :  Does  the  machinery  rule  men  or  men 
the  machinery?  The  whole  trick  in  managing 


8o      The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

a  locomotive,  he  points  out,  is  to  stop  blaming 
it  or  running  alongside  of  it  and  get  up  into  the 
cab.  Machines,  he  says,  are  the  glorious  self- 
assertion  of  man  in  matter.  Wireless  telegraph 
is  man's  arms,  railways  are  his  legs — his  limbs 
as  truly  as  are  his  limbs  of  flesh  and  blood.  In 
like  manner,  Hudson  Maxim  in  Defenseless 
America  quotes  Carlyle  (Sartor  Resartus)  as 
follows:  "The  first  ground  handful  of  niter, 
sulphur,  and  charcoal  drove  Monk  Schwartz's 
pestle  through  the  ceiling.  What  will  the  last 
do?"  It  will  "achieve  the  final  undisputed 
prostration  of  force  under  thought,  of  animal 
courage  under  spiritual."  "Such,"  Maxim 
still  quotes  Carlyle,  "such  I  hold  to  be  the 
genuine  use  of  gunpowder;  that  it  makes  all 
men  alike  tall,  ...  the  Goliath  powerless  and 
the  David  resistless."  From  which  it  appears 
/that  an  attitude  may  be  adopted  toward  ma- 
chinery that  shall  cause  it  not  to  enslave  per- 
sonality, but  actually  to  enlarge  its  scope,  and 
that  to  infinity. 

What  is  this  attitude?    It  is  not  the  attitude 
that  says:  We  will  bring  the  powers  of  nature 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     81 

into  subjection  to  man's  purposes.  Rather  it  is : 
We  will  so  study  the  laws  of  nature  that  we  will 
cooperate  with  them.  Gunpowder  will  blow  its 
inventor  to  pieces  just  as  quickly  as  any  other 
man,  if  its  laws  are  not  understood  and  obeyed. 

The  laws  of  nature,  properly  understood, 
properly  obeyed  by  way  of  cooperation  and 
legitimate  use,  neither  enslave  nor  are  enslaved. 
Disobeyed,  they  crush.  Cooperated  with,  they 
become  extended  legs  and  arms  for  the  individual 
and  the  nation.  To  quote  Gerald  Lee  again, 
machines,  "like  rain,  sunshine,  chemicals,  all 
god-like  things,  say  what  we  make  them  say  " — 
better,  what  we  enable  them  to  say.  How  do 
we  enable  them  to  say  it?  By  cooperating 
with  them  through  obedience  to  the  laws  that 
govern  them,  which  we  understand  and  they  do 
not. 

If  this  is  true  of  physical  machinery,  why 
not  of  social  and  political  machinery  as  well? 
Why,  through  cooperation  instead  of  through 
coercion,  may  we  not  have  more  unity,  more 
efficiency,  more  mechanism,  if  you  will,  in  our 
democratic  government  than  we  have  had  hither- 


82      The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

tofore,  and  still  remain  a  democracy,  but  a 
democracy  more  efficient  than  we  have  as  yet 
known?  Why  may  we  not  in  this  country 
realize  Ezekiel's  prophetic  vision,  when  he  saw 
the  spirit  of  the  living  creature  in  the  wheels? 

Unity,  efficiency,  perfection  of  technique— 
their  necessary  accompaniment,  depend  pri- 
marily on  knowledge  and  on  expert  knowledge. 

But  there  is  nothing  undemocratic  in  know- 
ledge, even  in  expert  knowledge.  As  the  physi- 
cal machinery  of  the  modern  world  is  the  result 
of  an  alliance  between  science  and  practical 
mechanical  needs,  so,  according  to  Croly,1 
there  must  be  an  alliance  between  business  and 
science,  if  we  get  a  technical  efficiency  indis- 
pensable to  a  generally  higher  standard  of 
living.  "  Scientific  management  in  the  largest 
sense  of  the  word  is  coming  to  be  the  great 
critical  and  regenerative  influence  in  business 
organization."  This  is  resented,  he  says,  by 
labor,  because  it  means  an  unprecedented 
severity  of  shop  discipline. 

1  Herbert  Croly,  The  Promise  of  American  Life.  Mac- 
millan  Co.,  1909. 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     83 

But  obedience  is  not  undemocratic.  The 
employee  has  got  to  see  that  his  little  egoistic 
me  is  only  a  part  of  his  personality,  that  the 
big  business  in  which  he  is  engaged  is  an  en- 
largement of  that  personality — an  extension  of 
his  own  arms  and  legs.  Failure  to  cooperate 
with  the  law  of  the  whole  and  intelligently 
to  cooperate  with  the  law  of  the  whole,  is  like 
cutting  off  his  own  limbs.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  employer  that  demands  slavish  submission 
from  his  employees  and  treats  them  like  chat- 
tels, is  like  the  man  who  thinks  he  has  sub- 
jugated physical  forces  only  to  be  blown  up  by 
his  own  gunpowder. 

In  politics,  there  is  nothing  undemocratic 
about  knowledge,  even  in  expert  knowledge. 

If  Germany  is  more  than  a  century  behind 
the  times  in  its  doctrine  of  the  feudal  state,  we 
are  more  than  a  century  behind  the  times  in  our 
doctrine  of  laissez-faire,  which  means  a  belief 
that  human  nature  has  a  certain  instinctive 
goodness  that  will  bring  it  out  all  right,  if  left 
alone,  and  so  that  the  state  must  keep  its  hands 
off  of  the  individual.  In  pioneer  days  when 


84     The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

we  were  in  isolation  from  other  nations  and 
hence  in  non -competition  with  them,  when  we 
had  a  sparsely  settled  country,  and  the  main 
problem  was  to  live  and  let  live  in  an  unex- 
hausted virgin  wilderness,  this  doctrine  worked 
fairly  well.1  But  the  time  has  come  when 
if  we  hold  our  own  among  the  nations,  we  shall 
have  to  wake  up  to  the  distinction  between 
individuality  and  individualism.  From  our 
failure  to  do  this  has  arisen  our  apotheosis  of 
mediocrity  and  our  prejudice  against  expertness. 
The  doctrine  of  laissez-faire  unchecked  means 
license,  not  liberty.  It  means  unrestrained 
egotism,  not  the  development  of  personality  as 
a  living,  breathing  vital  part  of  the  larger  whole, 
which  we  call  the  nation,  and  in  which  alone  it 
can  find  its  fulfilment. 

Unrestricted  individualism  is  as  false  to  the 
true  democratic  ideal  as  is  the  Prussian  idea  of 
the  divine  right  of  the  few  to  control  the  many. 
Unless,  as  Croly  points  out,  we  can  be  educated 
out  of  the  idea  that  all  that  is  necessary  for 

1  Herbert  Croly,  The  Promise  of  A  merican  Life.  Macmillan 
Co.,  1909. 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     85 

commercial  success  is,  simply  the  ingenuity  and 
daring  which  uninstructed  Yankeedom  has 
been  supposed  to  possess  by  nature,  we  are 
going  to  be  wiped  off  the  commercial  map. 
The  efficiency  of  our  democracy  will  be  per- 
petually challenged,  until  we  educate  public 
opinion  so  that  responsible  governmental  posi- 
tions from  the  President's  office  through  Con- 
gress down  to  the  various  municipal  offices,  shall 
be  filled  not  by  men  who  happen  by  some  acci- 
dent to  fill  the  public  eye  at  the  time  of  election 
or  to  strike  the  public  fancy,  not  by  men  who 
are  "available"  and  who  are  mere  representa- 
tives of  particular  parties,  but  by  men  who  have 
been  specifically  trained  as  experts  for  the  work 
they  are  to  do,  men  who  are  big  in  character  and 
in  statesmancraft  and  who  are  endued  with 
practical  sagacity  in  bringing  the  resources  of 
scientific  knowledge  to  bear  on  a  given  situation. 
That  a  man  has  been  a  successful  general  in  war, 
is  no  indisputable  and  sufficient  reason  why  he 
should  be  able  to  guide  the  ship  of  state.  That 
he  should  be  a  successful  business  man — an 
acknowledged  expert  in  making  automobiles, 


86     The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

for  instance — is  no  final  proof  that  he  will  make 
a  successful  President  of  the  United  States.  No 
successful  commercial  venture  or  educational 
project  is  ever  carried  through  on  that  basis. 
We  look  always  for  experts — experts,  too,  that 
have  proved  by  successful  experience  that  they 
can  do  the  thing  we  want  them  to  do.  The 
efficient  business  manager  does  not  expect  that 
an  expert  drummer  will  necessarily  make  a  good 
sanitary  engineer  or  does  a  college  or  university 
president  go  on  the  principle  that  a  specialist 
in  the  Semitic  languages  can  successfully  teach 
calculus. 

In  sum,  we  must  realize  that  the  democratic 
ideal  which  demands  that  every  man  should 
have  his  own  proper  chance,  becomes  a  fiasco 
when  it  is  interpreted  to  mean  that  anybody  is 
able  and  ought  to  be  allowed  to  fill  any  and 
every  kind  of  a  position  politically  from  the 
highest  to  the  lowest. 

The  democratic  ideal  docs  not  exclude  but 
necessitates  expert  service  to  the  state. 

The  democratic  ideal  demands  not  only 
trained  minds,  but  trained  characters — trained 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     87 

to  a  feeling  of  responsibility  for  the  good  of  this 
nation  as  a  whole. 

Are  the  politicians  thinking  of  themselves 
as  such  a  vital  part  of  this  republic  that  its 
interests  are  as  the  extension  of  their  own  legs 
and  arms — bone  of  their  bone,  flesh  of  their 
flesh,  failure  to  cooperate  with  which  means 
self -mutilation  and  finally  self-destruction? 
Time  and  again,  the  bitter  facts  are  pointed 
out  that  the  majority  of  our  national  and  state 
legislators  have  but  one  question  to  ask  with 
reference  to  a  pending  bill:  "What  is  there 
in  it  for  me?"  and  that  there  is  only  one  thing 
that  will  influence  them,  namely,  the  fear  of 
being  put  out  of  office.  Our  newspapers  reek 
with  contempt  for  our  national  Congress  as 
being  a  set  of  pork-barrel  rollers. 

But  who  is  responsible  for  all  this  ?  Who,  but 
the  body  of  enfranchised  Americans  who  put 
them  into  office?  Condemnation  of  our  politi- 
cians is  self-condemnation.  In  order  that  the 
democratic  ideal  may  be  realized  in  worthy 
leadership,  we  must  distinguish,  as  we  have  not 
distinguished,  between  liberty  and  license  of 


88      The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

speech.  It  has  been  said  repeatedly  that  men 
of  high  character  will  not  go  into  politics 
because  of  the  mud-throwing  in  which  our 
people  indulge.  Is  it  really  necessary  to  villify 
and  caricature  our  public  men,  in  order  to  make 
sure  that  they  are  voicing  the  voice  of  the 
people?  If  so,  the  voice  of  the  people  is  not 
thereby  proving  its  worthiness  to  be  voiced. 
In  order  that  the  democratic  ideal  be  further 
realized  in  worthy  leadership,  we  must  realize 
that  free  speech  must  also  be  fair  speech. 
Should  it  not  belong  to  a  national  juvenalia 
already  outgrown  that  the  sentiments  of  so 
many  of  the  newspapers  of  this  country  on  a 
given  situation  can  be  known  before  they  are 
opened,  in  that  a  republican  paper  will  a  priori 
condemn  the  action  of  a  democratic  leader  or 
vice  versa? 

Is  not  fair  play,  then,  of  the  very  essence  of 
the  democratic  ideal  ? 

The  complete  enfranchisement  of  women  is 
at  our  doors.  What  are  we  going  to  do  with 
it? 

You  cannot  do  too  much  to  help  along  all 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     89 

humanitarian  legislation.  Work  to  get  in  of- 
fice men  who  will  further  such  legislation.  But 
this  is  only  an  arc  in  the  great  circle  of  great 
ideas  for  which  this  nation  must  stand,  not  only 
if  it  fulfil  its  destiny,  but  if  it  even  keep  its 
place  and  name  on  the  map  of  the  earth. 

As  educated  women,  you  are  called  primarily 
to  become  mothers  of  sons  who  shall  be  not 
politicians  but  statesmen,  and  this  presupposes, 
first  of  all  and  most  of  all,  what  keenly  informed 
intelligence,  what  clarity  of  vision,  what  great- 
ness of  soul,  what  self-control  and  self-con- 
secration on  your  own  part ! 

Secondly,  if  the  enfranchisement  of  women  is 
to  result  in  an  increase  rather  than  in  a  diminu- 
tion of  our  national  efficiency,  we  have  got  to 
demonstrate  that,  given  the  ballot,  we  shall 
use  it  not  for  the  loaves  and  fishes  of  personal 
interest  it  is  going  to  bring  us  as  women  (if  we 
are  simply  to  repeat  the  tactics  of  the  machine 
politician — cui  bono),  but  that  with  informed 
and  pure-hearted  patriotism,  we  will  use  it  to 
put  men  into  office,  not  only  or  mainly  because 
of  their  attitude  toward  the  woman  question, 


90      The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

important  as  that  is,  but  because  of  their  ability 
to  conserve  this  great  republic  in  the  midst  of 
the  many  and  new  and  scarcely  comprehended 
dangers  that  beset  it  and  to  lead  it  on  to  those 
"shining  tablelands"  of  high  endeavor  which 
only  a  democracy  makes  possible. 

Lastly,  you  are  called  to  use  that  white  flame 
of  selfless  devotion  with  which  you,  as  represent- 
ing the  motherhood  of  the  race,  are  so  divinely 
endowed,  to  help,  so  far  as  in  you  lies,  the  best 
men  and  the  enlightened  men  of  this  country 
to  light  up  the  dark  places  of  our  national 
ignorance,  to  rekindle  the  holy  fires  of  our 
national  patriotism  so  that  it  shall  find  expres- 
sion not  merely  in  fourth  of  July  speeches,  or 
other  glittering  generalities,  but  in  the  dark  and 
devious  ways  of  our  national  politics.  Then 
shall  our  nation  follow  on  to  know  the  Lord 
as  did  Abraham  Lincoln,  who  saw  our  national 
destiny  "steadily  and  saw  it  whole"  and  who 
counted  not  life  itself  dear,  if  so  be  that  this 
nation  might  be  saved. 

In  discussing  the  efficiency  of  democracy,  I 
wish,  by  way  of  summary,  to  make  clear  that, 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     91 

to  my  mind,  the  best  elements  in  the  German 
system  can  help  us  to  a  truer  conception  of  a 
true  democracy  than  we  now  possess  and  that 
if  we  do  not  slough  off  certain  confusions  of 
thought  and  a  certain  dowdiness  of  ethical  ideals 
just  pointed  out  that  we  shall  not  only  fail  of 
our  high  mission  to  demonstrate  to  the  world 
the  possibility  of  a  democratic  form  of  govern- 
ment, but  that  we  cannot  indefinitely  hold  our 
own  as  a  nation  in  the  congress  of  highly 
organized,  efficient  European  nationalities. 

Intelligent  and  voluntary  cooperation  versus 
coercion — physical,  political,  or  religious,  is  the  * 
characteristic  note  of  the  efficiency  of  a  de- 
mocracy as  over  against  that  of  an  autocracy. 
We  want  to  get  up  in  the  cab  of  our  social  and 
economic  and  political  engine  instead  of  trying, 
like  a  setter  dog  I  once  saw,  to  race  with  the 
engine  and  so  to  do  our  individual  stunt  in  com- 
petition with  it,  or  to  hurl  ourselves  under  its 
wheels  in  mad  antagonism  to  it. 

Mind  you,  I  am  far  from  saying  that  co- 
operation does  not  exist  and  does  not  exist  to  an 
astonishing  degree  in  Germany,  more  particu- 


92      The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

larly  in  the  economic  life  of  the  nation.  What 
I  am  saying  is  that  cooperation,  which  is  team 
work  in  its  broadest,  deepest,  truest  sense, 
will  never  be  possible  in  an  autocracy  from 
the  very  nature  of  the  case,  since  it  is  based  on 
what  is  necessarily  precluded  by  an  autocracy 
as  such,  namely,  the  sacredness  of  personality. 

Just  so  far  as  any  system  sponges  out  the 
human  personality,  just  so  far — and  here  I 
express  my  solemn  conviction — just  so  far  it  is 
destined  to  perish. 

We  have  not  yet  learned,  as  we  must  learn, 
our  own  lesson  of  the  sacredness  of  personality. 
As  the  labor  contract  can  only  be  between 
free  man  and  free  man,  so  true  cooperation, 
I  repeat,  can  only  exist  between  personalities 
who  recognize  each  other's  rights  and  dignities 
and  worth.  To  respect  the  rights  and  dignities 
and  worth  of  our  own  personality  and  that  of 
every  other  with  whom  we  come  in  contact — 
do  we  do  it?  From  the  casus  belli  between 
nationalities  to  irritations  between  individuals, 
failure  to  do  this,  or  supposed  failure  to  do 
this,  is  the  foundation  rock  of  offense  in  this 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     93 

work-a-day  world  of  ours.  Booker  Washington 
had  this  sense  of  the  sacredness  of  his  own  per- 
sonality as  few  have  had  it.  "I  will  suffer  no 
man  so  to  pull  me  down  as  to  compel  me  to  hate 
him."  A  recent  writer  interprets  that  myste- 
rious utterance  of  the  sermon  on  the  mount : 
"Whosoever  shall  smite  thee  on  the  right  cheek 
turn  to  him  the  other  also,"  as  meaning:  "If 
one  insults  you,  do  not  return  the  insult,  rather 
let  him  repeat  it  than  to  degrade  yourself  to  his 
level."  Self-restraint  versus  loss  of  self-control 
is  the  most  difficult  of  virtues.  Yet  that  is 
what  the  sacredness  of  personality  demands 
of  us,  first  and  foremost.  It  is  demanded,  first 
and  foremost,  by  the  spirit  of  democracy. 

To  make  the  employee,  the  servant  in  the 
house,  the  little  child  feel  that  the  dignity  and 
rights  germane  to  them  are  as  unquestionably 
theirs  as  the  dignity  and  rights  of  their  employ- 
ers or  their  elders,  is  also  demanded  by  the 
spirit  of  democracy.  Some  writer  tells  of  a 
little  child  who  was  playing  with  a  toy  engine 
his  father  had  just  given  him.  The  mother 
called  the  boy  to  supper.  The  child  did  not 


94     The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

respond.  The  fact  of  the  matter  was  he  was 
so  absorbed  he  did  not  hear  her.  The  mother 
thought  it  was  disobedience  on  the  part  of  the 
child.  She  snatched  the  engine  from  him,  put 
it  out  of  his  reach,  picked  him  up,  and  placed 
him  forcibly  in  his  chair  at  the  table.  Her 
husband  leaned  across  to  her  and  whispered 
one  word:  "Thief."  The  engine  was  the 
child's  own  property;  she  had  not  rightly  re- 
spected his  rights. 

It  is  becoming  common  to  speak  of  this 
country  as  a  melting  pot.  Save  the  mark! 
If  that  is  what  it  is,  it  has  ceased  to  be  a  de- 
mocracy. Nevertheless  it  is  indeed  our  high 
destiny  to  show  that  even 

".  .  .  in  the  mud  and  scum  of  things 
There  alway,  alway  something  sings."1 

Other  nations,  as  Steiner  points  out,  have 
turned  religious  ideals  into  stone,  lace,  and 
lilies. a  But  what  of  the  Woolworth  Building,  he 
says — the  national  five-  and  ten-cent  enterprise, 

*  Music,  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson. 

•Introducing  the  American  Spirit,  Edward  A.  Steiner. 
Fleming  H.  Revell  Co. 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy      95 

which  has  caused  "spools  of  thread,  granite 
ware,  and  dustcloths"  to  flower  into  purest 
Gothic.  And  again  the  same  writer  makes 
articulate  the  American  spirit  as  endeavoring 
to  "shape  a  new  nation  out  of  the  world's 
refuse."  The  United  States  a  melting  pot? 
Nay,  rather  it  is  the  country  that  shall  gather 
the  peoples  of  all  nations  into  its  arms  as  one 
family,  because  of  their  noble  lineage,  because 
of  their  common  lineage  with  the  highest  born 
American — "which  was  the  son  of  Seth,  which 
was  the  son  of  Adam,  which  was  the  son  of 
God." 

These  United  States  are  the  promised  Beth- 
lehem of  the  world.  So  the  trend  of  events 
teaches.  No  manger  so  lowly  that  Immanuel 
— the  indwelling  God — may  not  there  be  born, 
whether  that  lowliness  represents  the  heart  of 
the  ignorant  emigrant,  the  clang  of  machinery, 
the  mechanisms  of  social  and  economic  life, 
or  the  unhallowed  ways  of  politics.  May  we  be 
granted  grace  to  see  ourselves,  our  fellows,  our 
country  sub  specie  aternitatis — under  the  aspect 
of  eternity. 


<X>     The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

If  we  are  true  to  our  ideals  of  democracy, 
it  is  not  enough  with  us  that  external  force 
should  mechanically  produce  results  rapid, 
perfect,  but  uninfused  by  the  free  human  spirit 
of  each  and  every  one  who  brings  them  about 
— the  spirit  of  the  living  creature  in  the  wheels. 
More  specifically,  it  is  not  enough  that  mar- 
riage, for  instance,  shall  have  passed  with  us 
from  status  to  legal  contract.  It  must  not  only 
recognize  the  personality  of  the  contracting 
parties;  it  must  also  recognize  the  deeps  of 
that  personality,  for — I  quote  Purington — "all 
thought  of  marriage  belongs  to  the  shrine  that 
nothing  may  illumine  but  the  altar  fire."  It  is 
not  enough  with  us  that  the  tilling  of  the  fields 
be  made  a  science;  though  it  must  be  made  a 
science,  it  must  also  become,  as  Steiner  says, 
it  must  also  become  a  "sacrament."  It  is  not 
enough  (and  here  you  will  recognize  Ruskin ') — 
it  is  not  enough  that  the  soldier  lay  down  his 
life  for  this  country  rather  than  leave  his  post 
in  battle,  the  physician  rather  than  leave  his 
post  in  plague,  the  pastor  rather  than  to  teach 

*  Unto  This  Last  (The  Roots  of  Honor). 


The  Efficiency  of  Democracy     97 

falsehood,  the  lawyer  rather  than  to  countenance 
injustice,  but  the  merchant  must  also  lay  down 
his  life  for  this  country  in  that  "it  becomes 
his  duty,  not  only  to  be  always  considering 
how  to  produce  what  he  sells  in  the  purest  and 
cheapest  forms,  but  how  to  make  the  various 
employments  involved  in  the  production  or 
transference  of  it  most  beneficial  to  the  men 
employed."  Let  us  carry  Ruskin's  thought  in 
this  passage  a  step  farther  and  say  that  our 
public  men  must  cease  to  be  politicians  whose 
master-passion  is  the  upbuilding  of  their  own 
fortunes  and  must  become  statesmen  whose 
master-passion  is  the  upbuilding  of  this  great 
nation. 

It  is  not  enough  in  our  country  for  a  man 
to  do  his  best  through  enforced  obedience  and 
to  receive  his  best  through  state  encouragement 
and  protection.  Rather  must  he  attain  the 
full  stature  of  a  man  through  a  big-visioned 
self -direction  and  self-expression  in  the  larger 
self  of  the  business  or  the  community  of  which 
he  forms  a  part  as  bone  of  his  bone  and  flesh 
of  his  flesh,  and  through  a  chance  to  play  a 


98     The  Efficiency  of  Democracy 

man's  part  in  a  world  of  men  by  means  of  self- 
help,  self-control,  self -consecration.  It  is  not 
enough  that  in  our  country  we  be  born  of  the 
flesh.  We  must  also  be  born  of  the  Spirit. 

Egoistic  interests,  party  interests,  class  in- 
terests— God  forbid  that  this  country  must  be 
steeped  in  blood  as  Europe  has  had  to  be  steeped 
in  blood  before  we  learn  how  little  "those  little 
old  things*'  really  matter. 

God  forbid  that  like  the  Hebrew  nation  we 
should  learn  what  true  national  loyalty  means 
only  after  we  have  been  swept  as  a  nation  off 
the  face  of  the  earth. 

God  grant  us  grace  that  with  heart  and  soul 
and  mind  and  strength  the  flame  of  a  passionate 
and  selfless  patriotism  may  fire  our  souls  before 
it  is  yet  too  late,  a  patriotism  that  finds  expres- 
sion in  those  immortal  words : 

"If  I  forget  thee,  O  Jerusalem,  may  my  right 
hand  forget  her  cunning.  May  my  tongue 
cleave  to  the  roof  of  my  mouth." 


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